As SoC and IP designs continue to increase in complexity while schedules accelerate, verification teams are looking for methodologies to improve design confidence more quickly. Formal verification techniques provide one route to improved design confidence, and the increase in papers and interest at industry conferences… Read More
Greater demand for more data exchange within data centers is being driven by mobile computing and the Internet-of-Everything. In 2011, it was estimated that over 1 Zettabytes (ZB) of data was pushed through the internet. That’s 1×10[SUP]21[/SUP] bytes of data. And, that amount has been doubling every 3 years since. Given… Read More
It seems to be FD-SOI week yet again. I talked to Thomas Skotnicki this morning. He is the father of thin-box FD-SOI and its birth is an interesting story. The story began 26 years ago (so not quite as far back as the photo!).
Thomas is of Polish origins (he is actually Tomeczek) and grew up in Warsaw where he earned his PhD. In 1983 in Canterbury,… Read More
High level synthesis (HLS) seems to have been part of the backdrop of design automation for so long that it seems to be one of those things that nobody notices any more. But it has also crept up on people and gone from interesting technology to keep an eye on to getting genuine adoption. The first commercial product in the space was behavioral… Read More
Last week I talked to Marco Brambilla of Synapse Design. Synapse is a design services company headquartered in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2003 by Satish Bagalkotkar and has been profitable since the beginning. Today it has over 700 people. In addition to the headquarters in Santa Clara, they have a software group in Colorado,… Read More
The headquarters of ST Microelectronics is officially in Switzerland, but in many ways the center of gravity is in the Grenoble area. You may have heard of Crolles where ST does process development, manufacturing and more, which is about ten miles north-east of the city. As a result, along with the CEA-LETI and Grenoble Institute… Read More
At the end of last month during ISSCC there was a forum organized by the SOI Consortium. It took place in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel (which, if you have never been there, is famous for converting its old entryway for carriages into an amazing dining room, and for a bar with a huge painting by Maxfield Parrish of the Pied Piper valued… Read More
Various foundries have made announcements about licensing FD-SOI technology from ST Microelectronics and then fallen quiet. GlobalFoundries made an announcement a couple of years ago. Samsung made an announcement just before DAC last year. But neither company has said anything much since. Of course the big noise at 14/16nm… Read More
This news in May 2014 that Samsung had licensed FD-SOI Technology from ST-Microelectronics was really amazing, as most of the industry was expecting this kind of agreement, but not with the #2 SC Company. But since May 2014 the news flow has been quite reduced, we can imagine that both SC companies had a lot work to do for transforming… Read More
The big picture is that planar semiconductor transistors don’t really work below 20nm. The reason is that the gate does a poor job of controlling the channel since too much channel is too far from the gate and so there is a lot of leakage even when the transistor is nominally off. So the channel needs to be made thinner. One way … Read More
