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
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
We live in very interesting times, you can wear an Android watch from Samsung that uses 14 nm FinFET technology, attend the 52nd DAC conference in June to learn about EDA and IP vendors supporting FinFET, and read about research work for new devices down to 5 nm. TCAD is that critical software technology that enables the development… 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
You may know that up until now NAND flash has been a planar technology. But just as with SoC processes where we have had to go vertical to FinFETs, NAND flash has reached the limitations of scaling in the 20nm nodes and is also going vertical. It is not just a lithography issue but there are also reliability and voltage scaling issues.… 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
