As Moore’s law started saturating on a single semiconductor die, the semiconductor community came up with the approach of growing vertically by stacking dies one above other in a 3D-IC arrangement. However, a major concern with a 3D-IC is that the heat generated by each die can get trapped in the stack, and hence it’s extremely important… Read More
In this age of SoCs with hundreds of IPs from different sources integrated together and working at high operating frequencies, FPGA designers are hard pressed keeping up the chip reliability from issues arising out of excessive static & dynamic IR drop, power & ground noise, electro migration and so on. While the IPs are… Read More
As Moore’s law keeps going, semiconductor design density on a chip keeps increasing. The real concern today is that the shrinkage in technology node has rendered the small wire geometry and gate oxide thickness (although fine in all other perspectives) extremely vulnerable to ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) effects. More than… Read More
Here, I am talking about reliability of chip design in the context of electrical effects, not external factors like cosmic rays. So, the electrical factors that could affect reliability of chips could be excessive power dissipation, noise, EM (Electromigration), ESD (Electrostatic Discharge), substrate noise coupling and… Read More
I could have written the sequence of the title in reverse order, but no, design is the one which initiates the need of a particular flow and the flow needs support of EDA tools to satisfy that need. It’s okay if the design is small; some manual procedures and workarounds/scripts may be able to perform certain jobs. However, as the design… Read More
At the onset of SoCs with multiple functionalities being packed together at the helm of technologies to improve upon performance and area; power, which was earlier neglected, has become critical and needs special attention in designing SoCs. And there comes reliability considerations as well due to multiple electrical and … Read More
What do nVidia, Freescale and GlobalFoundries have in common? They are semiconductor companies? They are ARM licensees? They are doing 28nm chips? They all have the letter ‘a’ in their names?
All true, but that’s not what I was thinking of. But the letter ‘a’ is a clue since Apache (and Ansys) begin with ‘a’. All three companies have… Read More
The next Apache webinar is coming up on 21st July at 11am Pacific time on “IP integration methodology”.
This webinar will be conducted by Arvind Shanmugavel, Director Applications Engineering at Apache Design Solutions. Mr. Shanmugavel has been with Apache since 2007, supporting the RedHawk and Totem product … Read More
