We live in an age of abundant information. There is a tremendous exchange of ideas crisscrossing the world enabling new innovative type of products to pop up daily. Therefore, in this era there is a greater need to understand competitive intelligence. Corporate companies today are interested in what other competitors are brewing… Read More
Tag: vlsi
Webinar: VLSI Design Methodology Development (new text)
Daniel Nenni was gracious enough to encourage me to conduct a brief webinar describing a new reference text, recently published by Prentice-Hall, part of the Semiwiki Webinar Series.
VLSI DESIGN Methodology Development Webiner Replay
Background
I was motivated to write the text to provide college students with a broad background… Read More
What Fairchild, AMD, Actel and Jurassic Park Have in Common
Me.
In the early stories of this series (Weeks three though six), I talked about what I believe were the three seminal events in the history of the semiconductor: Shockley’s invention of the transistor, Noyce’s invention of the integrated circuit, and Intel’s 1971 — the introductions of the first commercially successful… Read More
Is there anything in VLSI layout other than “pushing polygons”? (4)
The year is now 1991 and in search for a more peaceful life we decided to move to Canada. At that time, very few companies had advanced flows in VLSI but Ottawa having BNR, Northern Telecom, Mitel, etc., looked to be the most promising place. After a few hiccups in finding a job, I landed in MOSAID, a small company with35 people at that … Read More
Application binary interface, get this right and RISC-V is all yours
Starting a career in static timing analysis domain, and now actively working on an opensource implementation flow of RISC-V architecture, has been a journey. For last couple of months, I guess from around March this year, I was hooked to RISC-V buzz which was all over my Linkedin, my messages.
Being an STA and Physical design engineer,… Read More
Field-Solver Parasitic Extraction Goes Mainstream
Layout parasitic extraction (LPE) has three primary goals – accuracy, capacity, and throughput. Traditionally, LPE tools have offered two methods for capacitance derivation, with tradeoffs on these goals:… Read More
Is there anything in VLSI layout other than “pushing polygons”?
As I travel a lot in the last 15 years and visited customers as well as friends I was many times invited to talk to the Layout teams. The main purpose is always to encourage automation. So I developed a presentation related to market trend, technology trends, and latest tools advancements. In many cases I present updates from DAC (Design… Read More
The Importance of Transistor-Level Verification
According to the IEEE Std 1012-2012, verification is the acknowledgement that a product is in satisfactory condition by meeting a set of rigorous criteria. [3] Transistor-level verification involves the use of custom libraries and design models to achieve ultimate performance, low power, or layout density. [2] Prediction… Read More
Intel is Selling Itself Short on Trigate!
Perhaps the most pertinent comment raised by an analyst at Intel’s Investor Forum last week came from Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research to Brian Krzanich, the COO and head of global manufacturing and supply chain. He said: “I think you sold yourself short on Trigate, the benefit of fully depleted vs. planar and the impact on leakage.”… Read More