Intel is Selling Itself Short on Trigate!

Intel is Selling Itself Short on Trigate!
by Ed McKernan on 05-17-2012 at 9:15 pm

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


Analyzing Cortex Performance

Analyzing Cortex Performance
by Paul McLellan on 05-16-2012 at 7:45 am

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


MIPS, ARM, ARC, Imagination, Ceva

MIPS, ARM, ARC, Imagination, Ceva
by Paul McLellan on 05-15-2012 at 4:59 pm

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 at DAC: Scale to Millions of Jobs

RTDA at DAC: Scale to Millions of Jobs
by Paul McLellan on 05-10-2012 at 7:00 pm

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


Only slight growth in 2012 semiconductor market

Only slight growth in 2012 semiconductor market
by Bill Jewell on 05-09-2012 at 11:24 pm

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]

  • March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan disrupted
  • Read More

    Atrenta at DAC: Fast Lint, IP Kit and More

    Atrenta at DAC: Fast Lint, IP Kit and More
    by Paul McLellan on 05-09-2012 at 7:03 pm

    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


    Customers Talk About Reliability, Low-Power and 3D

    Customers Talk About Reliability, Low-Power and 3D
    by Paul McLellan on 05-09-2012 at 1:13 pm

    At DAC in San Francisco this year, Apache once again have a mixture of presentations by customers on their use of Apache tools and presentations by Apache themselves on their products. Most of the customer presentations are given just once, but the product presentations are given multiple times over the three days.

    I think one of… Read More


    Sagantec Update: More EDA Consolidation!

    Sagantec Update: More EDA Consolidation!
    by Daniel Nenni on 05-08-2012 at 7:00 pm

    Adding sophisticated 2D dynamic compaction technology to address 20nm and 14nm challenges. Santa Clara, California – May 3 ,2012 – Sagantec today announced that it has acquired Dutch startup NP-Komplete Technologies BV (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) for its physical design compaction and migration solutions based on a sophisticatedRead More


    TSMC 20nm Challenges!

    TSMC 20nm Challenges!
    by Daniel Nenni on 05-06-2012 at 7:00 pm

    Now that the 28nm challenges are dead
    It is time to look ahead
    The tabloid pundits may not agree
    But Moore’s law again you will see
    The semiconductor ecosystem is humming
    (2X gate density -20%+ performance-20%+ power savings)
    The 20nm design starts are coming!

    Okay, I’m really bad at poetry. Gambling however, I do pretty well. Las… Read More


    Formal Verification, there’s an App for that

    Formal Verification, there’s an App for that
    by Paul McLellan on 05-06-2012 at 6:00 pm

    The success of Apple’s AppStore has made people aware that software doesn’t have to be delivered in a big monolithic lump. Indeed, going back a bit earlier, Apple’s iTunes store made people aware that you didn’t have to buy a whole album if you only wanted a track or two.

    EDA applications in today’s… Read More