AI and machine learning are two popular buzz words in the high-tech daily news, so you should be getting used to hearing about them by now. What I hadn’t realized was that EDA companies are starting to use machine learning techniques, and specifically targeted at the daunting and compute intensive task of creating SPICE models… Read More
Silvaco has undergone one of the most impressive EDA transformations so it was a pleasure to interview the man behind it. David Dutton’s 30+ year career started at Intel, Maxim, and Mattson Technology where he led the company’s turnaround and finished as President, CEO, and board member. David joined Silvaco as CEO… Read More
In my office there are plenty of LED displays for me to look at throughout the day: three 24″ displays from Viewsonic, a 15″ display from Apple, an iPad, a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, a Nexus tablet, a Garmin 520 bike computer, and a temperature display. LED and OLED displays are ubiquitous in all sorts of consumer electronics,… Read More
I cut my teeth in silicon IC design at Texas Instruments during the early 1980’s working on what would eventually become the ASIC and Fabless IC industries that enabled the explosive growth of the electronics industry over the last three decades. Of late I’ve become involved in the silicon photonics space and I am getting an incredible… Read More
On my first trip to Austria for EDA business I traveled by car from Germany, and I couldn’t wait to see how fast we would travel on the fabled Autobahn. Oddly enough it was summertime and the Autobahn was filled with vacationing families driving cars with shiny, aluminum campers in tow, so our car only traveled about 60 mph, nothing… 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:
Coventor just rolled out the latest version of SEMulator3D, their virtual fabrication tool. Very conveniently it is SEMICON West this week and they have a booth. I dropped by and got a demo from David Fried, Coventor’s CTO about all the new stuff. He’s very proud of SEMulator3D’s new logo but mostly he is proud… Read More
Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about Silicon Cloud International (SCI). Their mission is to help smaller countries that have targeted semiconductor design as a way to move up the technology ladder from low-cost manufacturing. Last year everything was in the future but SCI now have their first two centers up and running. The first,… Read More
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
