If you have missed the announcement that Cosmic Circuits has been acquired by Cadence, dated February 7, you may want to read this PR. In any case, by reading this article you will understand why this acquisition is ringing the start of the “IP battle” between cadence and Synopsys. Let me remind you that I said in Semiwiki last September… Read More
We’ve been talking about the different technologies for FPGA-based SoC prototyping a lot here in SemiWiki. On the surface, the recent stories all start off pretty much the same: big box, Xilinx Virtex-7, wanna go fast and see more of what’s going on in the design. This is not another one of those stories. I recently sat down with Mick… Read More
Can’t make it to Santa Clara? Join us online!
The detailed 2013 CPTF agenda is now up in preparation for the February 5th event at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This is one of the rare times that you can get a free lunch! Watch this quick video to see what is in store for us this year. Dr. Paul McLellan and I will be there so please… Read More
I was at DesignCon in Santa Clara today and listened to Jonah Alben of NVIDIA’s keynote on what their approach is to improving design methodology. He started by pointing out that most companies underinvest in EDA (and he includes NVIDIA in this). Partially it is complaceny: that last chip taped out so we know we can do it again.… Read More
In my opinion, FinFETs will be the most significant piece of technology we, as semiconductor ecosystem people, will experience this decade. Seriously this is exciting stuff and one of the top search terms on SemiWiki for 6 months running. Here is a quick peek at what the top EDA companies will be talking about at the Common Platform… Read More
I sat down last week for lunch with Michael Sanie. Mike and I go back a long way, working together at VLSI Technology (where his first job out of school was to take over the circuit extractor that I’d originally written) and then in strategic marketing at Cadence. Now Mike has marketing for (almost?) all of Synopsys’s … Read More
PCI Express 3.0 increased the supported data rate to 8 Gbps, which effectively doubles the data rate supported by PCI Express 2.0. While the data rate was increased, no improvement was made to the channels. As such, an 8 Gbps channel in PCIe 3.0 experiences significantly more loss than one implemented in PCIe 2.0. To compensate for… Read More
TSMC and Synopsys hosted a webinar in December on this topic of double patterning and how it impacts the IC extraction flow. The 20nm process node has IC layout geometries so closely spaced that the traditional optical-based lithography cannot be used, instead lower layers like Poly and Metal 1 require a new approach of using two… Read More
We will soon start to see the quarterly financial reporting installments of the “Big 3” public EDA companies. I predict they will be as boring as usual. I am not sure if I would want it any differently though.
Back in the 90s there were times when it was truly interesting to wait to see what Cadence, Mentor, or later Synopsys, might announce.… Read More
SuperSpeed USB has been clearly ranked in the Interface protocols winner list, see this previous post. It could be interesting to dig into this IP market segment, determine in which applications USB 3.0 has been successfully deployed and who are the IP vendors serving this market, enabling SuperSpeed USB to take off.
SuperSpeed… Read More
