When I designed DRAM chips at Intel back in the 1970’s we didn’t really know what the die temperature would be before taping out silicon, instead we waited for packaged parts to come back and then did our thermal measurements. IC designers today don’t have that luxury of taping out their new SoC without having … Read More
SEMATECH has been around for over 20 years, starting in Austin. Today it is in upstate New York which increasingly seems to be the area for semiconductor research with IBM (still doing research although they sold their semiconductor business to GlobalFoundries), GlobalFoundries’ own Fab 8, the College of Nanoscale Science… Read More
It’s Silvaco’s 30 year anniversary. You may already know the dry official story of the early days:
At the most basic level, semiconductor design is all about transistors. Any report on a large microprocessor or mobile application processor is in awe about how many transistors it contains. Moore’s Law is all about the most economic way to manufacture transistors. Each process generation for the last decade and looking ahead… Read More
Most of what is talked about on SemiWiki is silicon design. After all for regular SoCs it is the only game in town. But for high voltage power applications (think automotive for one big market) there are other more esoteric technologies becoming more attractive.
Silicon has been the material of choice for high-voltage power applications… Read More
Recently, I talked about meeting with Dave Dutton the CEO of Silvaco. Mainly we were talking about the recent acquisition of Invarian but he also brought me up to date on Silvaco and how he is bringing their disparate product lines into a more focused strategy.
See also Silvaco Swallows Invarian
Silvaco would be the first to admit … Read More
Yesterday, Silvaco announced that it has acquired Invarian Inc. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.
Who is Invarian? They are a recognized leader in block-level to full-chip sign-off analysis for complex, high-performance ICs. Their unique methodology utilizes a parallel architecture and concurrent power-voltage-thermal… Read More
TCAD is a somewhat specialized area since not that many people design semiconductor processes compared to the number who design chips. Bit without TCAD there would be no chips. One area where the two domains intersect is that of SEE, where neutrons (mainly) can cause a flop or a memory bit to change. Since we live on a radioactive planet… Read More
Two weeks ago I blogged about amorphous silicon and how that material is well-suited for designing TFTs. Today I’m following up after watching the archived webinarpresented by Nam-Kyun Tak of Silvaco. After clicking on that link you’ll be brought to a brief sign-up page and then can watch the archived webinar in your… Read More
Most ICs are fabricated with crystalline silicon (c-Si), which is a tetrahedral structure forming a well-ordered crystal lattice. There’s another form of semiconductor material called amorphous silicon (a-Si) which has no long-range periodic order. It turns out that a-Si is a great material for the active layer in thin-film… Read More
