Automation for digital design has been mainstream for a couple of decades but place and route for analog is still in its infancy. Many attempts have been made over the years to automate analog design in one way and another, the bodies are piled up on the hillside. Much analog design is still largely done with custom layout and circuit… Read More
EDAC has a series of seminars for emerging companies with Jim Hogan. Jim has been in EDA since, like, forever. First at National, then at Cadence, then at Artisan (now ARM) and then as an investor first at Telos (Cadence’s VC arm) and more recently on his own at Vista Ventures. He has been involved with many EDA and semiconductor… Read More
At EDPS in Monterey, Tom Spyrou of AMD talked about their compute environment in the context of parallel algorithms. I discovered that they are a big user of RTDA’s FlowTracer so I talked to Philip Steinke at AMD about how they used it.
He said that they largely use it as described in The Art of Flows as a graphical distributed … Read More
Since most of you have not heard of Novocellthis is more of an introduction but they have been around for 10+ years and are NVM (non-volitile memory) pioneers. NVM has evolved into a critical part of the semiconductor ecosystem which is why I sought them out. While SiDense and Kilopass bury each other in legal fees Novocell is doing… Read More
Perhaps the most pertinent comment raised by an analyst at Intel’s Investor Forum last week came from Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research to Brian Krzanich, the COO and head of global manufacturing and supply chain. He said: “I think you sold yourself short on Trigate, the benefit of fully depleted vs. planar and the impact on leakage.”… Read More
CPAK sounds like something politicians create to collect money, but in fact it is a Carbon Performance Analysis Kit. It consists of models, reference platform, initialization software (for bare metal CPAKs) or OS binary (for Linux and Android based CPAKs). They are (or will soon be) available for ARM Cortex A9, ARM Cortex A15 and… Read More
The Linley Group, whose conference on mobile I recently attended, has some interesting data about the processor core market. Firstly, the numbers are big: CPU cores shipped in over 10 billion chips last year which is up 25% on last. ARM has a share of 78% of that entire market. The big surprise to me was the #2 was not MIPS but Synopsys… Read More
RTDA is all about enterprise level scalability. Their three main products all scale to be able to handle the most demanding needs of large companies with large farms of servers. Of course there are some new refinements too.
LicenseMonitor can scale to 70,000 simultaneous checkouts with 1 billion checkout records in the database.… Read More
The world semiconductor market declined 2.2% in 1Q 2012 from 4Q 2011, according to WSTS. The market ended 2011 on a down slide, with 4Q 2011 down 7.7% from 3Q 2011. The year 2011 semiconductor market was up only 0.4%.
Three major events contributed to the weakness in 2011:
[LIST=1]
Atrenta will have a new look this year at DAC. I’m not quite sure what that means but we’ll all just have to go along and find out.
They have three users talking about their use of Atrenta’s tools. All 3 of these presentations are in the user-track poster session on Tuesday June 5th 12.30-1.30pm in room 105 (which … Read More
