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
Let’s play word association. I say “EDA”, you immediately think “Synopsys”. I say “IP” and although 15 years ago you may not, today, you think “Synopsys”. For nearly two decades, Synopsys has grown its IP business through both organic development and acquisition, with a clear focus on enabling designers to meet their time-to-market… Read More
It has been a year since my article Semiconductor Landscape in Jan 2012 I wanted to look back into the major events over the year and then anticipate what’s in store going forward. What has happened over the year is much more than what I could foresee. Major consolidation in EDA space – Synopsys acquired Magma, SpringSoft, Ciranova,… Read More
In 2012 FinFET is one of the most talked about MOS technologies of the year because traditional planar CMOS has slowed down on scaling below the 28nm node. To learn more about FinFET process modeling I attended a Synopsys webinar where Bari Biswas presented for about 42 minutes include a Q&A portion at the end.
Bari Biswas, Synopsys… Read More
One of the largest software companies in the world, Synopsys is a market and technology leader in the development and sale of electronic design automation (EDA) tools and semiconductor intellectual property (IP). Synopsys is also a strong supporter of local education through the Synopsys Outreach Foundation. Each year in multiple… Read More
You can’t have failed to notice that 20nm is coming. There are a huge number of things that are different about 20nm from 28nm, but far and away the biggest is the need for double patterning. You probably know what this is by now, but just in case, here is a quick summary.
Lithography is done using 193nm light. Today we use immersion… Read More
