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What to Expect from the GSA Executive European Forum?

What to Expect from the GSA Executive European Forum?
by Eric Esteve on 04-02-2019 at 7:00 am
Categories: Events, Global Semiconductor Alliance, IPnest, Semiconductor Services

I plan to attend to the GSA European Forum in Munich (April 15-16), so I first looked at the event description and at the impressive speakers list. In such event, the goal is at 50% to listen, and 50% to network with the speakers and the other attendant. The center of gravity is clearly semiconductor, but the event involved speakers from all the ecosystem around the semi industry.

We can start by naming the semiconductor heavyweights, Samsung, Infineon, TSMC, ST Micro, NXP or ON Semi, but it’s interesting to notice that their customers are also part of the speakers. We are in Munich, a place where the automotive industry is part of the land DNA, so it’s not surprising to see that BMW, Robert Bosch or Continental will participate.

And also, AImotive (founded in 2015, the company target autonomous level 5) and Smart Eye (developing solutions based on eye tracking technology to address safety related needs in automotive) or AnotherBrain (who has created a new kind of artificial intelligence, called Organic AI) targeting automotive, industrial automation and some IoT.

The networking industry is well represented with speakers from Nokia Mobile Networks, Mellanox and Huawei. This Chinese company help bridging with the service part of the ecosystem, with another well-known company, Canyon Bridge, a Chinese fund with HQ in the Silicon Valley.

I rank in the service category the EDA big 3, Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys and I realize that Soitec is providing SOI wafer, another kind of service, but rather hardware! HIS Markit and Mc Kinsey will be part of the speakers too.

You can register to the GSA Forum here, or just take a look so you will have the opportunity to read this abstract:

This year, we’re focusing the conversation on how to best take advantage of unprecedented opportunities that are available to us today – AI, Automotive, IoT, 5G, High Performance Computing, Cloud, AR/VR, etc. – while darker clouds seem to be appearing on the horizon: trade wars & tariffs, signs of industry inventory buildups and of a slowing Chinese economy. And at the same time with the industry ecosystem shifting and expanding, blurring the lines between semiconductors, software, services, solutions and systems.

Thanks to Sandro Grigolli from GSA, I could have a look in advance to a couple of presentations that were recently delivered internally to the GSA board on two topics that will be presented also at the European Executive Forum in Munich. I don’t want to spoil the event, so I have just extracted two slides from Canyon Bridge presentation “China Semiconductor Market Overview”, that I find extremely informative about “China Goals” and “Fab capacity in China”.

The GSA Executive Forum is clearly networking oriented, but the quality of some presentations make it closer of a geopolitical conference than just a pure marketing event.

Eric Esteve from IPnest

 

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Moore’s Law extended with new "gateless" transistor

Moore’s Law extended with new "gateless" transistor
by Robert Maire on 04-01-2019 at 10:00 am
Categories: Semiconductor Advisors, Semiconductor Services
6 Comments

Micron Buries the Hatchet with China
Micron has a very long history of counter cyclical investing, buying the assets of vanquished competitors when the memory industry is at the bottom of the cycle, such as it is right now.

Over the weekend, Micron announced that it had an agreement to acquire the assets of the now stalled Jinhua memory fab in China. Concurrent with the acquisition agreement, the Chinese government will lift all current restrictions on Micron in China now that Micron will be manufacturing memory devices in China.

The fab which Jinhua built in China has been stalled since the US government ordered US equipment makers to stop doing business with Jinhua, similar to what happened to ZTE. This means that after spending several billion dollars building the fab it became essentially useless after US equipment companies such as Applied Materials, Lam, KLA and even Dutch ASML pulled out in a hurry. Although the purchase price was not reported in the press release, we would speculate that Micron paid pennies on the dollar (or yuan) for the idled assets.

Micron CEO comments
Micron’s CEO Sanjay Mehrota commented on the proposed transaction, “This deal is very compelling as it accomplishes many things for Micron. It gets us new capacity, in a rapidly growing market, China and it puts an end to all of our legal restrictions in China. We were also able to obtain these assets at a very attractive price given their current under-utilization” , Sanjay added ” We are quite pleased with the fab as it has the exact set of tools needed for Micron’s process. In addition the fab is physically laid out just like Micron’s Taiwan fab including the software infrastructure”

As part of the agreement the US government will unblock sales to the former Jinhua fab which we are sure the current administration will position as a big win, for the US, much as the agreement to restart sales to ZTE.

KLA Kosher Konversion
Following the closing of KLA’s recent Orbotech acquisition, the company announced that it would be changing its corporate domicile from the US to Israel for a number of reasons. Post the Orbotech close, KLA, which already had substantial operations in Israel, became one of the largest tech companies in Israel. Israel’s “Office of the Chief Scientist” which is responsible for fostering technology in the country offered KLA several hundred million dollars of financial grants and development loans and in addition offered 10 years of tax abatements if KLA would move its corporate headquarters to Israel and commit to further expansion. Israel, most recently offered hundreds of millions of dollars of incentives to Intel for building is newest 10NM fab there. Israel’s announced deal with KLA would go even beyond that.

KLA, which has a history of creative finance, commented on the deal with CFO Bren Higgins saying, ” Aside from the obvious strong direct financial benefit for KLA shareholders we also see benefit for KLA customers as an Israeli company as many of our products whose sale may have been restricted as a US based company will be freed up to to sell to rapidly emerging markets such as China.” Higgins went on to say, “We had already seen evidence of China reducing US purchases of equipment in reaction to trade concerns, this will remove that barrier” .

The deal which had been negotiated during the long gestation period of the Orbotech deal was also a strong factor in China’s final approval of the deal as China would get more access to KLA product. The secret discussions even had a code name inside the company called “project K” (for Kashering).

IBM new transistor design supports Moore’s Law
The semiconductor industry has wrestled with transistor design to enable a continuation of Moore’s Law by allowing further shrinkage of the basic transistor dimensions. The industry started with “Planar” transistors, then at 22NM went to “FINFETs” (Fin shaped field effect transistor) and most recently GAA (Gate All Around) which shrinks the dimensions even further.

IBM’s research group has announced a GBG (euphemistically call “gate be gone” ) which eliminates the need for a gate which radically reduces the dimensions of the new device. Some in the industry are dismissing IBM’s announcement as nothing more than a “rehash” of prior designs of PINFED’s (Pin field effect diodes)

Saranicle is new pellicle material with 95% EUV transmission
Dow Chemical is said to be working with ASML to solve the vexing pellicle problem which is hampering the roll out of EUV. The new material is a polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC) which makes for a thin flexible membrane. In addition to the high, 95%, EUV transmission factor, which is well above today’s 85%, the material also offers significant mechanical benefits. Old pellicle’s were glued to the mask which produced “outgassing” as the pellicle heated. ASML’s recent “clip” pellicle attachment also had problems as the clips generated particle contamination. Saranicle “clings” through electrostatic forces to the mask eliminating the need for glues or clips.

Versum moves listing from NYSE to Ebay
Versum, a New York stock exchange listed company (ticker VSM), has been stuck in a “tug or war” between Entegris and Merck, both looking acquire the company. Merck has recently gone “hostile” announcing an unsolicited $5.9B or $48 per share versus Entegris’s roughly $39 stock offer. Versum decided it was in the best interest of shareholders to move their stock listing from the NYSE to Ebay in order to facilitate the bidding process. The new Ebay listing has a $100 a share, “buy it now” option.

The Stocks

New memory based ETF starts trading as “MEM”
Given that commodity DRAM and NAND memory pricing has been the underlying driver of many of the chip stocks, equipment companies, semiconductor ETFs as well as the Philadelphia Stock index ( the “SOX”), it was only a matter of time before a direct ownership memory based ETF popped up. Similar to the “GLD” ETF which holds actual gold bullion in various repositories around the world the MEM ETF will stock pile actual memory chips of ranging types and capacities from DRAM to NAND. The Chicago exchange also announced options and futures trading based on the MEM ETF which will also start trading today.

If you haven’t gotten it by now….Happy April First!!

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FPGA Landscape Update 2019

FPGA Landscape Update 2019
by Daniel Nenni on 04-01-2019 at 7:00 am
Categories: Achronix, eFPGA, FPGA, Xilinx
8 Comments

In 2015 Intel acquired Altera for $16.7B changing one of the most heated rivalries (Xilinx vs Altera) the fabless semiconductor ecosystem has ever seen. Prior to the acquisition the FPGA market was fairly evenly split between Xilinx and Altera with Lattice and Actel playing to market niches in the shadows. There were also two FPGA startups Achronix and Tabula waiting in the wings.

The trouble for Altera started when Xilinx moved to TSMC for manufacturing at 28nm. Prior to that Xilinx was closely partnered with UMC and Altera with TSMC. UMC stumbled at 40nm which gave Altera a significant lead over Xilinx. Whoever made the decision at Xilinx to move to TSMC should be crowned FPGA king. UMC again stumbled at 28nm and has yet to produce a production quality FinFET process so it really was a lifesaving move for Xilinx.

In the FPGA business whoever is the first to a new process node has a great advantage with the first design wins and the resulting market share increase. At 28nm Xilinx beat Altera by a small margin which was significant since it was the first TSMC process node Xilinx designed to. At 20nm Xilinx beat Altera by a significant margin which resulted in Altera moving to Intel for 14nm. Altera was again delayed so Xilinx took a strong market lead with TSMC 16nm. When the Intel/Altera 14nm parts finally came out they were very competitive on density, performance and price so it appeared the big FPGA rivalry would continue. Unfortunately, Intel stumbled at 10nm allowing Xilinx to jump from TSMC 16nm to TSMC 7nm skipping 10nm. To be fair, Intel 10nm is closer in density to TSMC 7nm than TSMC 10nm. We will know for sure when the competing chips are field tested across multiple applications.

A couple of interesting FPGA notes: After the Altera acquisition two of the other FPGA players started gaining fame and fortune. In 2010 MicroSemi purchased Actel for $430M. The initial integration was a little bumpy but Actel is now the leading programmable product for Microsemi. In 2017 Canyon Bridge (A Chinese backed private equity firm) planned a $1.3B ($8.30 per share) acquisition of Lattice Semiconductor which was blocked after US Defense officials raised concerns. Lattice continues to thrive independently trading at a high of more than $12 per share in 2019. Given the importance of programmable chips, China will be forced to develop FPGA technology if they are not allowed to acquire it.

Xilinx of course has continued to dominate the FPGA market since the Altera acquisition with the exception of the cloud where Intel/Altera is focused. Xilinx stock was relatively stagnate before Intel acquired Altera but is now trading at 3-4X the pre-acquisition price.

Of the two FPGA start-ups, both of which had Intel investments and manufacturing agreements, Achronix was crowned the winner with more than $100M revenue in 2018. Achronix originally started at Intel 22nm but has since moved to TSMC 16nm and 7nm which will better position them against industry leader Xilinx. Tabula unfortunately did not fair so well. After raising $215M in venture capital starting in 2003 Tabula officially shut down in 2015. They also targeted Intel 22nm and according to LinkedIn several of the key Tabula employees now work for Intel.

According to industry analysts, the FPGA market CAP broke $60B in 2017 and is expected to approach $120B by 2026 growing at a healthy 7% CAGR. The growth of this market is mainly driven by rising demand for AI in the cloud, growth of Internet of Things (IoT), mobile devices, Automotive and Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS), and wireless networks (5G). However, the challenges of FPGAs directly competing with ASICs continues but at 7nm FPGAs will have increased speed and density plus lower power consumption so that may change. Especially in the SoC prototyping and emulation markets which are split between ASICs and FPGAs.

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Lyft Uber and Soylent Green

Lyft Uber and Soylent Green
by Roger C. Lanctot on 03-31-2019 at 10:00 am
Categories: Automotive

23223 lyft uber soylent green

It wasn’t enough that Lyft and Uber introduced the world to the concept of taxi and limousine drivers committing suicide, we now have Lyft and Uber drivers committing suicide. In other words, it’s not enough that the business models of these companies are suicidal, they are actually visiting suicide upon their non-employees.


SOURCE: Opening scene from “Soylent Green”​

But what if the business model isn’t about providing transportation? What if the real objective of Uber and Lyft is population reduction – like Soylent Green?

Terrifying and saddening though it may be to see taxi and limousine drivers commit suicide after finding – post-Uber/Lyft – that they could no longer afford to pay off either their expensive taxi medallions or their vehicles or their mortgages, it was nevertheless understandable. It was even understandable when drivers for Uber in India committed suicide after Uber over-promised regarding their likely compensation causing some of these drivers to over-commit to buying new cars.

The reason the drivers in India suddenly found themselves in a financial bind was that Uber over-recruited drivers tilting the driver-demand balance toward an unbearable compensation level for the drivers. By the time the drivers realized their quandary, it was too late. That experience was several years ago, but now we are seeing Lyft drivers in the U.S. committing suicide in the midst of a heated battle over a regulation requiring that Lyft pay drivers a minimum wage.

Lyft is resisting the implementation of the new regulation in New York after the negative impact the minimum wage had on fares – driving them up and driving away passengers. As reported in TechCrunch: “These rules legally went into effect in February. Since then, Lyft says there has been a negative impact on driver earnings. That’s because, Lyft says, the cost for passengers increased 24%, which led to rides dropping 26% and driver earnings dropping 15%. Lyft had to then take “action to stabilize the market largely through the use of passenger discounts. We won’t do this forever, but knew it was important for both the driver community and Lyft while the lawsuit progressed.”

No doubt Lyft also reduced fares to maintain market share in the face of closer scrutiny in advance of its initial public offering. The bottom line is that the New York minimum wage requirement was the last Jenga block the removal of which brought down the Lyft-Jenga tower.

The simple reality is that Lyft and Uber can’t afford to pay drivers a minimum wage or the entire business model collapses. But maybe that’s not the purpose of Uber and Lyft and Ola and Yandex and Gett. Maybe the entire purpose of these services is to reduce surplus population.

Imagine a distopian present where there is a surplus of drivers in a world that is shifting toward driverless cars and mass transportation. Government organizations, given the task of reducing the growing ranks of this restive population, cook up a scheme to put more of them in the business of providing ad hoc transportation than the market can bear.

Soon packs of roving “drivers” begin derailing trains and running over bike and scooter users in order to drive more business into their itinerant taxis. Before long, demand for cars begins to grow again as non-drivers see the error of their ways and get back in cars – either their own or as Lyft and Uber passengers. This, of course, exacerbates the driver surplus problem with Purge-like consequences as mayhem ensues.

Suicides committed by taxi and limousine drivers – even one – ought to have been enough to open the eyes of regulators and legislators to the inequity and untenability of ride hailing in its current form across the world. The fact that ride hailing drivers – even one – might have committed suicide ought to have been the final straw. The business model simply does not hold water. There is no alternative revenue track like in-vehicle search or advertising that is sufficient to replace existing driver compensation structures. Lyft has become Soylent Green.

There is one path out of this transportation network company-driven mess. One company has solved this riddle and is fighting for its non-profit corporate life. Ride Austin is a TNC non-profit in Austin that thrived in a post-Uber/Lyft environment before the two companies were allowed back into the local market last year. It just may be that the ride hailing business was intended to be a non-profit proposition. Don’t tell that to Lyft investors.

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Lyft & Auto Industry Annihilation

Lyft & Auto Industry Annihilation
by Roger C. Lanctot on 03-31-2019 at 5:00 am
Categories: Automotive

The good news is that Lyft’s initial public offering is over-subscribed, according to published reports. That also happens to be the bad news.

Like its disruptive corporate kin – Waymo, Uber, and Tesla Motors – Lyft is out to creatively destroy the automotive industry. In the process, the company is set on a course for its own annihilation – and investors appear more than happy to speed the company along to its own doomed demise.

Car ownership is in the crosshairs of Lyft, Uber and most other ride hailing providers. They have repeatedly announced their intention to separate their customers from their cars. Of course, they draw their drivers from this same population, so this proposition in itself is somewhat self-annihilating.

Car ownership is not the only target of Lyft’s destructive inclinations. Lyft, like Uber and other ride hailing companies, is out to damage or destroy the rental car and the taxi and limousine industries – to say nothing of the negative impact on public transportation (Why take the bus/train/tram?). More recently, during the IPO road show, senior Lyft executives have announced their intention to take on the insurance industry.

One of Lyft’s bigger objectives, though, is to eliminate drivers by mastering automated driving. The company has also invested in scooters and bike sharing – both of which are taking business away from its own ride hailing service.

This fits in nicely with the broader trends in the automotive industry which is set on a path toward electrification, autonomous driving and the proliferation of mobility services. Electrification – and the massive billion-dollar investments that it entails – threatens to wipe out massive swathes of the automotive supply chain even as it demands a colossal and expensive expansion of of charging networks.

Electrification also threatens car dealer networks – at least those, in particular, that are dependent upon the servicing of ICE-based vehicles. Autonomous vehicles, like ride hailing, will eliminate the need for car ownership, as will mobility services. Car makers are heavily investing in these value propositions as well.

As if this automotive industry implosion weren’t enough, the President of the United States continues to be something of a one-man wrecking ball thrashing through the industry. The latest report on the administration’s activities suggests the makings of an escalated tariff war intended to erect barriers at U.S. borders certain to simultaneously make new cars more expensive while stimulating retaliatory tariff strikes against U.S. car makers.

https://tinyurl.com/y5g9tg9t – Trump Administration withholds Report Justifying ‘Shock’ Auto Tariffs – politico.com

Lyft is not the cause of all of this self-destructive mayhem. It is only the most visible and immediate manifestation.
Investors are enthusiastic about Lyft. Are there skeptics? Yes, many. Take Nicholas Farhi, a partner at OC&C strategy consultants quoted in the Washington Post: “The endgame you need to believe is so implausible in my mind – it’s definitely at the ‘hypiest’ end of the unicorns. It’s hard for me to think of a rational reason why people would invest in this.”

Tiernan Ray, writing for TheStreet.com, took issue with Lyft’s creation of what it calls “contribution” – a figure which strips out all operating expenses to disingenuously suggest an improving financial picture for Lyft.

https://tinyurl.com/y2crnofa – Lyft Will be Relying on One Unorthodox Number to Sell its IPO – TheStreet.com

There is something else that Lyft is destroying even as it creates a newish mode of transportation. Lyft is a major contributor to increased traffic congestion, vehicle emissions and, possibly, highway fatalities.
Three researchers published a model that they claimed showed a causal connection between the onset of ride hailing services and rising highway fatalities. The conclusions have been challenged, but the proposition is enough to give pause.

http://tinyurl.com/yxp8c2ke – Ride Sharing Services May Lead to More Fatal Accidents – chicagobooth.edu

http://tinyurl.com/yy9ooe27 – Unsafe Uber? Lethal Lyft? We’re Skeptical – cityobservatory.org

Lyft, Uber, Yandex, Ola, Didi, Grab, Gett services are adding hundreds of thousands of cars to already clogged highways and city streets. In fact, the apps used by the drivers are designed to attract drivers to already congested areas, where there are the greatest number of potential customers.

At recent industry events I have found audience participants increasingly concerned with the already large and growing negative impact – i.e. carbon footprint – of the entire ride hailing business. It’s especially noisome when one considers the substantial amount of driving that occurs without any passengers in the cars.

Given the “oversubscribed” state of Lyft’s IPO I don’t anticipate any great awakening and/or rejection of the idea of ride hailing as anything other than a brilliant way to burn cash in anticipation of a massive post-loss exit – at least for investors. It is unwise though to be entirely blind to the collateral damage unfolding on the highways, in the air and in the wallets of taxi drivers. Creative destruction for its own sake is hardly a bedrock investing philosophy. Good enough for Lyft, though.

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Semiconductor Foundry Landscape Update 2019

Semiconductor Foundry Landscape Update 2019
by Daniel Nenni on 03-29-2019 at 5:00 am
Categories: FD-SOI, FinFET, Foundries, GlobalFoundries, Intel Foundry, Samsung Foundry, TSMC

The semiconductor foundry landscape changed in 2018 when GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Intel paused their leading edge foundry efforts. Intel quietly told partners they would no longer pursue the foundry business and GF publicly shut down their 7nm process development and pivoted towards existing process nodes while trimming headcount and repositioning assets.

Moving forward this puts TSMC in a much more decisive position in the foundry landscape which has been talked about by the mainstream media. The interesting thing to note is that the semiconductor foundry business was based on the ability to multisource a single design amongst two, three or even four different foundries to get better pricing and delivery. That all changed of course with 28nm which went into production in 2010.

TSMC chose a different 28nm approach than Samsung, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, UMC and SMIC which made the processes incompatible. Fortunately for TSMC their 28nm HKM gate-last approach was the only one to yield properly which gave them a massive lead that had not been seen before. While Samsung and GF struggled along with gate-first HKM, UMC and SMIC changed their 28nm to the TSMC gate-last implementation and captured 2nd source business from TSMC following the long time foundry tradition.

Again it changed back to single source when FinFET technology came to TSMC in 2015. FinFET is a complicated technology that cannot be cloned without a licensing agreement. TSMC started with 16nm followed by 12nm, 10nm, 7nm (EUV), and 5nm (EUV) which will arrive in 2020. Samsung licensed their 14nm to GF which is the only second sourced FinFET process. Samsung followed 14nm with 10nm, 8nm, 7nm (EUV), 5nm (EUV) will follow.

Today there are only two leading edge foundries left, TSMC and Samsung. TSMC is currently the foundry market leader and I see that increasing when mature CMOS process nodes that have second, third, and even fourth sources become obsolete and the unclonable FinFET processes take over the mature nodes.

If you look at TSMC’s revenue split, today 50% is FinFET processes and 50% is mature CMOS nodes (Q4 2018). In Q4 2017 FinFET processes were 45% and in Q4 2016 it was 33%. As the FinFET processes grow so does TSM’s market share and that will continue for many years to come. As it stands today TSMC has revenues of $33.49B in 2018 which represents a 48% foundry market share. Revenue growth in 2019 may be limited due to the global downturn but TSMC should continue to claim market share due to their FinFET dominance.

In 2018 GLOBALFOUNDRIES, the #2 foundry, pivoted away from leading edge process development (7nm/5nm) to focus on mature processes (14nm, 28nm, 40nm, 65nm, 130nm and 180nm) and the developing FD-SOI market with 22FDX and 12FDX following that.

In 2018 UMC, the #3 foundry, still struggled with 14nm which forced long time ASIC partner Faraday to sign an agreement with Samsung Foundry for advanced FinFET processes. Today, UMC relies on mature process nodes: 28nm, 40nm, 55nm, 65nm, and 90nm for the bulk of their revenue from a select base of high volume customers. Even when UMC perfects FinFETs at 14nm it will not be TSMC compatible so the market will be limited. UMC’s 2018 revenue of $4.91B represents a 7.2% market share being the second largest publicly traded foundry (GF is private).

Samsung, the #4 foundry, is in production at 45nm, 28nm, 28FDSOI, 18FDSOI, 14nm, 11nm, 10nm, 8nm, and 7nm. Samsung is a fierce competitor and gained significant customer traction at 14nm splitting the Apple iPhone business with TSMC. Even today Samsung is a close second to TSMC in 14nm if you include GF 14nm which was licensed from Samsung. Samsung was also the first to “full” EUV at 7nm. Samsung’s largest foundry customer of course is Samsung itself being the #1 consumer electronics company. Qualcomm is also a very large Samsung Foundry customer amongst other top fabless semiconductor companies including IBM and AMD. The foundry business was always about choices for wafer manufacturing so you can bet Samsung will get their fair FinFET market share moving forward, absolutely.

In 2018 SMIC, the #5 foundry, also struggled with FinFETs. Mass 14nm production is slated to begin in 2019, again it is not TSMC compatible but in China it does not necessarily have to be. Today SMIC is manufacturing 90nm and 28nm wafers mostly for fabless companies in China. When 14nm hits high volume manufacturing the China FinFET market will likely turn to SMIC in favor of non Chinese 14nm fabs as it did at 90nm and 28nm. The challenge SMIC has always faced is yield and capacity and that will continue. In 2018 SMIC recorded sales of $785M which represents a 4.5% foundry market share with the majority of it based in China.

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How to Spice Up Your Library Characterization

How to Spice Up Your Library Characterization
by admin on 03-29-2019 at 5:00 am
Categories: EDA, Events

It used to be that at the mention of libraries, people would think of foundry PDK deliverables. However, now a host of factors such as automotive thermal requirements, nanometer FinFET processes, near threshold voltages, higher clock rates, high volumes, etc., have dramatically changed library development. These factors have led to new library formats such as Liberty Variation Format (LVF) and Composite Current Source (CCS). Both of these formats incorporate more accurate modeling approaches than their predecessors AOCV and POCV. However, achieving this higher accuracy comes at the price of increased processing requirements to generate models.

The newer models are more statistically oriented. CCS includes slew rate and load dependent timing information. The net result is a requirement for many more SPICE runs and, of course, more computation. Chip designers now often have library needs that go beyond what the foundry supplies, shifting the burden for library characterization to the chip design side.

Recently Silvaco broadcast and posted a webinar that addresses the issues around library characterization facing semiconductor companies. In the webinar Silvaco’s Bernardo Culau pointes out the rapidly increasing number of PVT corners that need to be modeled to ensure design success. Among the drivers he cites extended temperature ranges, temperature inversion effects, the trade-off between power and operating voltage, and high temp burn-in corners. According to him, these and other considerations can necessitate simulating each cell in the library at hundreds of corners.

The real issue with library characterization is that each project may have different needs for libraries and varying capabilities needed for generating the needed models. Of course, the largest semiconductor companies can keep a fully staffed group dedicated to characterization with plentiful tool licenses and compute farm access. This luxury is not available to smaller companies or those with less frequent library characterization requirements. Relying on library providers for project or customer specific characterization can be expensive and delay projects. Companies that have specialized characterization needs, but that occur only occasionally, are faced with a difficult choice.

It can be expensive to maintain the staff and resources in-house for infrequent characterization needs. Also, if it is only done periodically it is hard to maintain the expertise needed to ensure the best results. One of the main thrusts of the Silvaco webinar relates to potential solutions to this problem for a wide range of companies. Silvaco has a unique mix of capabilities, including tools, professional services and access to the needed compute resources.

For smaller companies, it does not make sense to keep on hand the number of license keys necessary for rapid library characterization. Characterization calls for short duration, high volume tool licenses. Silvaco offers their SmartSpice simulator that is well suited for this task and they have developed business models that make sense for a wide range of companies. In the webinar Silvaco also discusses several approaches to provisioning compute resources. They include on-site, Silvaco servers and cloud services such as AWS or Google Cloud.

The centerpiece of their library characterization offering is the Viola product which is a complete solution for library characterization. It leverages parallel processing to accelerate the results. It also offers tight links to validation tools. Not only does it work with Silvaco’s SmartSpice, it also works with other leading simulators, such as HSPICE and Spectre. Lastly it is compliant with TSMC’s reference flow for statistical characterization.

Silvaco has thought through the requirements for library characterization for different types of enterprises and projects. Based on the webinar presentation, they are putting together an attractive set of business models, coupled with matched technical elements. To understand the challenges and their complete solution I suggest visiting their website to view the entire webinar.

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With Great Power Comes Great Visuality

With Great Power Comes Great Visuality
by Daniel Nenni on 03-29-2019 at 12:00 am
Categories: AMIQ EDA, EDA

Every system-on-chip (SoC) designer worries about power. Many widely used electronics applications run on batteries, including smartphones, tablets, autonomous vehicles, and many Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Even “big iron” products such as network switches and compute servers must be careful when it comes to power consumption. Not every customer can be located next to a hydroelectric dam or a power plant. Even those users willing to pay for vast amounts of electricity may have to comply with “green” laws that cap their draw on the grid.

In response to these requirements, the industry has developed a wide range of techniques to manage power consumption, from clever circuit designs to system-level software control. The most common approach is turning off portions of the SoC not currently active and then turning them back on when required. Instead of being completely powered on and off, the voltage and/or clock speed of a clock domain may be raised or lowered “on the fly” as needed to satisfy critical functionality and meet performance goals.

SoCs may contain dozens of clocks domains with thousands of possible off/on combinations, only some of which are legal. Power controllers that scale the domains up and down are very complex. It is a significant challenge for designers to understand the full scope of power management and for verification engineers to check all legitimate combinations. The consequences of a bug can be severe; a power domain that can’t be turned back on could lock up the chip. Even worse, too many domains powered on at the same time could lead to thermal runaway and chip failure.

So what is the poor SoC engineer to do? I recently talked with Cristian Amitroaie, the CEO of AMIQ EDA, about the power-domain visualization and navigation capabilities in their Design and Verification Tools (DVT) Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It seems to me that their approach makes it much easier for design and verification engineers to create, manage, and validate power domains, from IP blocks all the way up to large SoCs. I’d like to review some of the features that struck me.

For a start, DVT Eclipse IDE handles both common formats for specification of power intent, including power domains. Common Power Format (CPF) came from The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2), while Accellera defined Unified Power Format (UPF). UPF has been standardized as IEEE Std. 1801-2015, which was an attempt to merge the two formats. CPF advocates argue that the IEEE standard is missing some key features, but since AMIQ EDA supports both UPF/IEEE and CPF (version 2.0), SoC teams are free to choose their preferred format.

One critical feature in DVT Eclipse IDE is automatic generation of power supply diagrams from an IEEE Std. 1801 or CPF specification. These diagrams show all the power domains, the connections between them, and the signals from the RTL design that control the domains. Engineers can click on a power domain and jump to the location in the power-intent file specifying the details for the domain. Engineers can also click on a control signal in the diagram and jump to that same signal in the RTL source file. Thus, it is easy to cross-check the design and power-intent files.

This ability is very useful since an IEEE Std. 1801 or CPF file is distinct from the RTL design files. This enables the separation of power intent from implementation, good practice when dealing with any sort of architectural specification. The downside is that it is common for the two descriptions to get out of synchronization as the design evolves. Renamed signals and changes in the design hierarchy can render the power intent file outdated. As Cristian points out, the visualization capabilities of DVT Eclipse IDE make it easy to keep track of changes.

The IDE includes analysis engines “under the hood” that check for many types of problems. Any inconsistencies between the power-intent file and the design are detected and reported visually. DVT Eclipse IDE re-compiles its internal model whenever code changes are made, so it instantly cross-checks any edits to UPF/CPF or RTL files and reports any mismatches. The IDE also detects any syntax or format errors made in any of the design and verification files, including power intent.

In addition to the language and consistency checks, users specifying power domains can benefit from the same features available for all the other languages and formats supported by the IDE. Available features include the power supply network diagrams, source code editors, a hierarchy browser, and schematics of the design. It is easy to navigate among these screens while following a signal or an element in the hierarchy. Color coding is used to visually link common elements across multiple views.

If an engineer makes a mistake, for example typing “create_power_domains” into the UPF editor, the IDE instantly reports this as an error and recommends a correction to the proper “create_power_domain” command. The IDE also makes suggestions; typing in only “create_” pops up a menu showing the possible auto-completions and allowing the user to choose. The IDE can also generate a template for a new command, showing which fields the user must fill in, with both auto-completion options and error reporting available.

Cristian reports that their solution greatly reduces the time it takes to learn a standard and to create a power-intent specification, even for expert users who know the format well. The challenges of SoC power management continue to grow, and it’s hard to imagine designing or verifying a large chip without the support of DVT Eclipse IDE. More information is available, as is a short but impressive video. I encourage you to investigate further, absolutely.

To learn more, visithttps://dvteclipse.com/products/dvt-eclipse-ide.

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Spring Forward with AI

Spring Forward with AI
by admin on 03-28-2019 at 5:00 am
Categories: AI, EDA, Security


The euphoria of NCAA March Madness seems to spill over into the tech world. The epicenter of many tech talks this month spanning from GPU conference, OCP, SNUG to CASPA has evolved around an increased AI endorsement by many companies and its integration into many silicon driven applications. At this year CASPA Spring Symposium, many prominent industry and academic leaders shared their perspectives on the proliferation of AI augmentation into the Internet of Things and the impact of AI of Things (AIoT) on the future of semiconductor industry.

Following is the excerpt of a presentation given by Dr. Steve Woo, Fellow and Distinguished Inventor at Rambus Inc. on ‘AI in the Era of Connectivity’. Since joining Rambus, Steve has worked in various roles leading architecture, technology, and performance analysis efforts as well as in marketing and product planning roles, leading strategy and customer related programs.

Steve was very upbeat about the current transformation we are living in. Driven by the recent advances in neural networks and the rise of powerful computing platforms, AI’s reach and impact on our society has broadened. “In our interconnected world, the needs of data centers, edge computing and mobile devices are continuing to evolve as the role of AI in each vertical segment is evolving as well,” he said. However, the critical challenges remain for enabling higher performance, more power efficient and secure infrastructures supporting AI –all of which offer opportunities for the semiconductor industry.

Digital Data Growth

He added that while the industry demand for performance and capabilities due to the digital data surge is trending up, the primary tools that the industry has relied on for decades, Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling, are slowing or no longer available. A critical challenge will be figuring out how to continue providing more performance and power efficiency in their absence. The infrastructure itself is important as it has incredible values in managing data.

With the amount of growing digital data globally, the memory, link and storage performances have to keep-up in moving data to the processor engine, while both compute and I/O power efficiency must continue to improve as well. The emergence of edge computing has also imposed high performance and low power need for training and inference. He highlighted several steps to mitigate such a demand. This includes at the cloud level: to analyze broad behaviors and pushing the models to the edge and endpoints; at the edge/endpoints to be more selective in communicating processed and higher value data instead of raw data; and having a cloud-processing closer to data (at or near endpoints) –thus, improving the data latency, bandwidth and energy use as well as reducing stress on the underlying network.

AI Needs Memory Bandwidth

The memory bandwidth is a critical resource for AI applications. Inference tasks on older, general purpose hardware such as Haswell, K80 performs well as applications may benefit from the compute and memory optimizations. On the other hand, inferencing on newer silicon such as the Google TPUv1 built for AI processing is largely limited by the memory bandwidth.

There are three well known options to common memory systems for AI applications: On-Chip memories, HBM (High Bandwidth Memories), and GDDR (Graphics Double Data Rate). On-Chip memory offers highest bandwidth and power efficiency as implemented in Microsoft’s BrainWave and Graphcore’s IPU. HBM implementation in products such as AMD Radeon Rx Vega 56, Tesla V100 offers very high bandwidth and density. The additional interposer/substrate and new manufacturing/assembly methods may require additional risk to be dealt with as it is not as well understood as DDR or GDDR cases. The third option, GDDR as found in products such as nVidia GeForce RTX2080Ti delivers good tradeoff between bandwidth, power efficiency, cost, and reliability. The current mainstream refresh for HBM is HBM2 and GDDR is GDDR6, respectively.

Security is paramount

Security around data is also becoming a concern as cyber related attacks are increasingly targeting infrastructures, not just the individual users. Both usage sharing of cloud hardware and the growing system complexity have expanded the surface vulnerability area to exploits. His take is to not compromise security in lieu of a good performance gain. “Security must become a first‐class design goal, we cannot treat security as an afterthought and attempt to retrofit it into silicon and systems,” he stated.

Recent exploits like Spectre, Meltdown, and Foreshadow have shown that security can be compromised through unexpected interactions between features in the processor. Processors are becoming more complex, meaning the number of interactions is growing exponentially. This has led the industry to conclude that new approaches are needed for providing secure computing. One such approach that Steve discussed is siloed execution. In this scenario, physically distinct CPUs are utilized that process secure operations and secret data on a security CPU, while non-secure applications and data can be processed on a general-purpose CPU. The general-purpose CPU can be as performant and feature-rich as necessary, while the security CPU can be simple and optimized for security. Segregating processing and data in this manner also allows secret data to remain secret even if the general-purpose CPU is hacked.

Steve elaborated more on Rambus security solution called CryptoManager Root of Trust, which is comprised of customized RISC-V CPU and a Crypto Accelerators and secure memory components. It provides secure boot, remote attestation, authentication with various encryption modes (such as AES, SHA) and runtime integrity. The following diagram illustrates how it may be augmented into an AI system capable of operating in cloud environments by decrypting multiple user training sets and models using different keys, and running them on cloud AI hardware.

To recap, AI is driving a renaissance in computer architecture and memory systems. The conflict between performance and security is more pronounced as data and insights are increasingly more valuable. Along this line, design teams need to ensure addressing the security aspects on top of design complexity as it only takes one vulnerability for hacker to compromise the entire system and data security.

For more info on Rambus, please check HERE

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Managing Formal Complexity Even into AI

Managing Formal Complexity Even into AI
by Bernard Murphy on 03-27-2019 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, Synopsys
2 Comments

The Synopsys Formal group have a reputation for putting on comprehensive tutorials/workshops at DVCon and this year again they did not disappoint. The theme for the Thursday workshop was tackling complexity in control and datapath designs using formal. Ravindra Aneja, who I know from Atrenta days, kicked off the session with their main objective: to overcome common concerns raised by folks interested in formal but concerned about the extent to which it can contribute. These should sound familiar: on what types of design can I use formal, how well does it scale to large functions and what do I really save by using formal?

Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise next presented on formal for SoC designs. I don’t think I can do justice to his full presentation, so I’ll just mention a few points he emphasized for scalability. First, and most obviously, apply formal to smaller functions (such as complex state machines) that are so tangled they are really hard to verify comprehensively using dynamic verification. For larger functions, he suggests using a method he calls proof-engineering; this is simply breaking down a larger problem into smaller pieces which you can prove individually and then assemble into fuller, more complete proofs on the larger system. That shouldn’t be too scary – it’s engineering 101 after all. He talks about common methods in formal to handle these, including assume-guarantee and case-splitting. Don’t worry about the jargon; the underlying concepts in these techniques are not at all complicated.

Nitin Mhaske (another Atrenta alum) next talked about using formal to verify control logic. generally considered to be the sweet spot for formal. Widely cited examples in this space include complex state controllers; Nitin use a PCIe/USB LTSSM and a 10G/40G Ethernet state controller. I would add cache coherency controllers as another good example. What all of these have in common is many states and multiple paths to those states, complex state transition conditions and difficulty in ensuring that all possibilities have been considered in verification. Nitin detailed techniques to attack verification of these systems, also how to look deeper in a design using bug-hunting to check behavior beyond what you can intuitively see.

The final section attracted me especially because the speaker (Per Bjesse of Synopsys) talked about formal verification of datapaths, a topic typically considered a no-no for formal. Synopsys have been quietly advancing their HECTOR™ technology (now under the hood in their DPV app) for several years now and seem to have some serious customer validation. These include proofs from 32-bit to 128-bit FPUs across all the standard opcodes from ADD to MULT, DIV and SQRT, many completing in minutes, others in no more than a few hours and the most complex in around 6 hours.

They have also discovered that this analysis is particularly promising for proofs in systolic arrays of multiply-accumulate (MAC) functions. Does that sound familiar? It should; these are the basis of neural net (NN) architectures. Of course proofs at this level are not going to prove that an image is correctly recognized, but they will prove that the foundation logic matches the intended implementation. This is not as trivial in many cases as it may sound; for example, it has become very common to have varying and non-standard word-widths between planes in inference NNs at the edge. I can imagine this foundational level of verification could prove quite important in the overall verification plan.

What’s under the hood? I was told that the number of proof engines is often smaller than for control proving, and includes the familiar BDD, SAT and SMT methods, though more tuned to datapath proofs. Since a good deal is automated, effort in using this technology can actually be simpler than for general formal verification; examples mentioned were integer multiply (with a result < 20 bits), AES single round and floating-point half-precision. Also, the datapath-proving algorithms work with both C and RTL, a significant convenience when verifying algorithms developed in C/C++ and obviously allowing for much faster proofs at this higher level of abstraction. My take-away? If you’re still on the fence about formal, scalability is manageable, proving in control logic already has well-established value and proving in datapath logic is now looking more practical. As for value in the overall verification task, many companies are already doing this as an adjunct to dynamic verification. They have reported that it saves them time, because their formal group can start finding bugs while the dynamic folks are still building testbenches. It adds confidence because those functions that have been proven formally are known to be solid. And it mostly replaces simulation for those functions assigned to formal proving. I say mostly because I have seen cautious verification managers still use interface assertions from formal proofs in dynamic testing. But they’re not repeating the formal testing, they just want added confidence (after all, the people who created the formal properties can make mistakes too).

You can learn more about the full range of Synopsys formal capabilities HERE.