If you are in Europe then the CDNLive! EMEA user conference is in Munich at the Dolce Hotel from May 14th to 16th. Like last month’s CDNLive! in Cadence’s hometown San Jose, the conference focuses on sharing fresh ideas and best practices for all aspects of semiconductor design from embedded software down to bare silicon.… Read More
Tag: semiconductor
Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out?
Do you need more servers? Do you need more licenses? If you are kicking off a verification run of 10,000 jobs on 1,000 server cores then you are short of 9000 cores and 9000 licenses, but you’d be insane to rush out with a purchase order just on that basis. Maybe verification isn’t even on the critical path for your design,… Read More
Broadcom announces an HFC
For a long time Cisco had a very high end product whose official internal name during its years of development was HFR, which stood for Huge F***ing Router (the marketing department insisted it stood for ‘fast’). Eventually it got given a product number, CRS-1, but not before I’d read an article about it in the… Read More
Mergers and Acquisitions in EDA should spark Innovation and Start ups
With the recent closure of the Synopsys Magma deal and the economy showing a bit of uptick and some positive outlook compared to the last 3-4 years, I believe it’s time for some of the creative minds that find themselves looking for new opportunity to consider starting their own point tool as well as IP companies.
Many of these people… Read More
DAC 2012 Must-See! Hogan’s Heros: Learning from Apple
Who doesn’t love the perennial Hogan’s Heros panel at DAC? Always provocative and illuminating, for technologists, entrepreneurs, and strategists.
At DAC 2012, Jim Hogan’s panel is “Learning from Apple”:Apple. We admire their devices, worship their creators and praisetheir stock in our portfolios. Apple is synonymous with… Read More
Flexible ASIC Strategy!
During my last Taiwan trip I also spent time with Global Unichip. Clearly, in order for the semiconductor industry to thrive we must enable design starts. With the rising costs and complexity of semiconductor design and manufacturing this is a much greater challenge which is why I’m so interested in GUC, for the greater good of the… Read More
The Carbon Decade
Carbon Design Systems celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. It is a celebration that the company has survived a decade but also bittersweet that the company hasn’t been acquired for a juicy premium. But we just have to accept that EDA is not a business where you can throw together a company in 18 months and sell it for $1B… Read More
Introduction to FinFET technology Part I
This is the first of a multi-part series, to introduce FinFET technology to SemiWiki readers. These articles will highlight the technology’s key characteristics, and describe some of the advantages, disadvantages, and challenges associated with this transition. Topics in this series will include FinFET fabrication,… Read More
Laker Wobegon, where all the layout is above average
TSMC’s technnology symposium seems to be the new time to make product announcements, with ARM and Atrenta yesterday and Springsoft today.
There is a new incarnation of Springsoft’s Laker layout family, Laker[SUP]3[/SUP] (pronounced three, not cubed). The original version ran on its own proprietary database.… Read More
Soft Error Rate (SER) Prediction Software for IC Design
My first IC design in 1978 was a 16Kb DRAM chip at Intel and our researchers discovered the strange failure of Soft Errors caused by Alpha particles in the packaging and neutron particles which are more prominent at higher altitudes like in Denver, Colorado. Before today if you wanted to know the Soft Error Rate (SER) you had to fabricate… Read More