Of course if you are in the business of selling high-level synthesis (HLS) tools then the obvious answer is immediately. Start at 9am tomorrow morning. But a more realistic answer is when you are having to do something completely new. If you are working on a legacy design, perhaps with pre-existing IP, then moving the design up to … Read More
You have probably heard of the Internet of Things or IoT. This is the future world in which not only are our computers and smartphones connected to the internet, but all sort of other things like thermostats, medical monitors, smart car-keys and soil analyzers. What these “things” have in common is that, unlike computers… Read More
Well, Sweden is not noted for its carnivals, Brazil is not noted for it’s tall blonde blue-eyed women, Sweden’s climate is not great for growing sugar cane and Brazil’s isn’t great for reindeer. Both countries speak languages with odd-sounding vowels but they are not the same language. But, ding, Jasper… Read More
GenApSys is a biotech company developing proprietary DNA sequencing technology. As part of that they develop their own custom sequencing chips. These have an analog component and like many people they use the Cadence Virtuoso analog design environment for this.
I talked to Hamid Rategh who is GenApSys’s VP engineering.… Read More
We all have a funnest bug we’ve been involved with. I don’t think ‘funnest’ is actually a word but when my kids used to use the word ‘funner’ I didn’t have a good argument as to why it wasn’t a word, it just seemed a word I’d never heard. In fact I have no idea what the rules are… Read More
A couple of weekends ago I moderated a panel session for the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association. No, I had no idea such an organization existed either (at least partially because I’m not Chinese). Dan Nenni was meant to be doing it but he went off to Las Vegas, so I ended up getting the job. On a Saturday … Read More
At the onset of SoCs with multiple functionalities being packed together at the helm of technologies to improve upon performance and area; power, which was earlier neglected, has become critical and needs special attention in designing SoCs. And there comes reliability considerations as well due to multiple electrical and … Read More
At Semicon I met with Applied Materials to learn about epitaxy. This is when a monocrystalline film is grown on the substrate which takes on a lattice structure that matches the substrate. It forms a high purity starting point for building a transistor and is also the basis of the strain engineering in a modern process.
Since holes… Read More
How reliable is your cell-phone? Actually, you don’t really care. It will crash from time to time due to software bugs and you’ll throw it away after two or three years. If a few phones also crash due to stray neutrons from outer space or stray alpha particles from the solder balls used in the flip-chip bonding then nobody… Read More
This week, I had a nice opportunity meeting Charu Puri, Corporate Marketing and Sushil Gupta, V.P. & Managing Director at Atrenta, Noida. Well, I know Sushil since 1990s; in fact, he was my manager at one point of time during my job earlier than Cadence. He leads this large R&D development centre, consisting about 200 people… Read More
