TSMC has had an interesting year thus far. 28nm is ramped and will dominate the mobile market for years to come. 20nm is in development with tape outs scheduled for the end of this year. FinFETS are coming making it a very exciting time in the semiconductor ecosystem.
Continue reading “TSMC Update 2012!”
ClioSoft had a record year in 2011, right after they started working with SemiWiki. Coincidence? Of course not. You can visit the SemiWiki ClioSoft landing page HERE. Be sure and read the customer interviews done by Daniel Payne. It is really nice to see customers stand up and speak for their tools, much more interesting than listening to the vendors talk about themselves.
As they say, you can learn a lot about an EDA company from their DAC plan. ClioSoft continues the customer centric approach by showing you why ON Semiconductor, Lattice Semiconductor, Allegro Microsystems, and Rohde & Schwarz along with 20 other organizations standardized ClioSoft as their Design Data Management solution vendor in 2011.
ClioSoft is the premier developer of hardware configuration management (HCM) solutions. The company’s SOS design data collaboration platform is built from the ground up to handle the requirements of hardware design flows. The SOS platform enables global team collaboration, design & IP reuse, and efficient management of design data from concept through tape-out.
The SOS Hardware Configuration Management platform is seamlessly integrated
with popular IC design flows:
* Cadence’s Virtuoso(R) AMS and Custom IC Design
* SpringSoft’s Laker(TM) Custom Layout Automation System
* Synopsys’ Galaxy Custom Designer
* Mentor’s Pyxis IC Station, and HDL Designer
* Digital IC and software design flows
The ClioSoft Visual Design Diff (VDD) engine enables easy identification of changes between two versions of a schematic or layout by graphically highlighting the differences directly in the editors. For a users point of view on VDD see IC Layout at Qualcomm.
Please visit the ClioSoft booth #2426 at DAC. To schedule a meeting or product demonstration click HERE.
ClioSoft also invites you to a game of Texas Hold’em starting at the top of each hour. The winner of EVERY game gets an Amazon Kindle, a popular e-book reader. This is a very fast paced game so be sure and bring your sunglasses and your extra aggressive betting strategy.
Also Read
Every year or so Mary Meeker (at Kleiner-Perkins) does a big presentation on internet trends. Since the internet in general and mobile in particular is a big driver for the semiconductor industry, this report is a treasure trove of useful data and interesting facts.
For example, this graph shows the adoption rate of iPods, iPhones and iPads in the months after they were first launched. The iPad is the fastest growing device ever. Way faster than iPhone and you can barely see iPod early adoption (the green sliver at the bottom). And that was a product that many people (including me) thought “why would I want an overgrown iPhone that doesn’t even make calls”. Now I find I use it more and more and I really only use my MacBook for input heavy stuff like writing and putting business spreadsheets together. In fact almost a third of US adults already have a tablet or eReader. So all you companies giving away iPads at DAC: nice, but we’ve got one already.
Android adoption is perhaps even more amazing. Of course this is aggregating many suppliers, and nobody is getting rich on Android adoption (even Google makes more money on search on iPhone than it does on Android). But it is already over half the market for smartphones.
Mobile is huge, already over a trillion dollar industry. But more importantly is that it is increasingly the way people access the internet, now up to 10% of all traffic. Facebook’s big weakness is it doesn’t have a way to monetize people on mobile. People won’t tolerate lots of ads on the small screen, the display real-estate is too limited. Latest rumors are Facebook is going to build their own phone. Like it’s going to be so good that people would rather access Facebook on it than using an app on their iPhone. I don’t see how that is likely to be successful?
One more factoid. Print takes 7% of the time we use media but still has 25% of the advertising dollars, although falling fast (the New York Times revenue is falling off a cliff, for example). Radio, TV and Internet are fairly balanced. But mobile consumes 10% of our time but only 1% of advertising dollars. I hope this doesn’t change too much in a dumb way, since as I said above the screen is so small that ads are really intrusive on a phone. But the numbers show the size of the opportunity. And it will only grow (fast).
And don’t forget to amaze your grand-kids one day with how we used to build little houses for telephones, so small you couldn’t even sit down. They won’t believe you…
You can see the whole presentation here.
What is new with Mentor? Quite a bit actually. About this time last year Corporate Raider Carl Icahn stirred things up with a hostile takeover attempt that ended with three Raiderettes on the Mentor Board, out of eight board members total. This year however, two of the three Raiderettes are out so it looks like Mentor is firmly in control. Daniel Payne attends the board meetings and has put up some nice blogs:
Two New Board Members For Mentor
Carl Ichan Blinks in Bid for Mentor Graphics
Shakeup at Mentor Graphics
One of the new Mentor board members, Dan McCranie, I know personally. I worked for him at Virage Logic. One thing I can tell you about Dan is that he is a hard driving no nonsense guy so you may see more positive changes at Mentor. Dan McCranie is also good with mergers, acquisitions, and exit strategies, he certainly sold Virage Logic for a premium.
Mentor was one of the first SemiWiki subscribers so they have a very good landing pageHERE. As they say, you can tell a lot about an EDA company by their DAC plan. This year IC Design and Test is where the action is followed by ESL and Functional Verification, AMS/Custom IC Design, Embedded Software, and PCB Design and Manufacturing:
At this year’s DAC, Mentor will share EDA techniques and technologies, developed in partnership with the world’s largest design houses and foundries, that will help make you successful at the leading edge of IC development.REGISTER HERE for IC Design and Test events.
Technology and economics are driving the move up in abstraction from chip design to system design and from RTL to TLM. Abstraction, by itself, has limited value. Automation unlocks the full value in moving up in abstraction. Design creation and Verification automation capabilities are being adapted to the new level of design abstraction. Simultaneously, smarter verification automation improves productivity. The move up in design abstraction will push verification abstraction past TLM, opening new automation opportunities. REGISTER HERE for ESL and Functional Verification events.
Mentor Graphics provides advanced solutions for today’s most challenging Custom IC design and verification projects. These solutions include the world’s leading interactive custom IC routing technology and Mentor’s Faster Spice – full SPICE accuracy – simulator, Eldo Premier. Attend the following sessions to learn what is new today and what is coming soon and hear how other design teams are cutting months off their tape out schedules. Join us in the Mentor booth at DAC.REGISTER HERE for AMS and Custom IC Design events.
No one knows embedded better than Mentor. Come hear how we are helping developers and silicon partners optimize their products for design and cost efficiency at the following DAC activities. REGISTER HERE for Embedded Software events.
As the worldwide leader in PCB design software, we are constantly innovating to help you manage the increasing complexities of today’s systems design. Our sessions focus on the most pressing issues in systems design: global collaboration, accelerating time-to-market, increasing profits, and optimizing PCB design reliability.REGISTER HERE for PCB Design and Manufacturing events.
One year ago the annual share holder meeting at Mentor Graphics had tight security, a no-camera policy, and the drama of Carl Icahn the corporate raider successfully adding three new board members. Fast forward to today where two of Icahn’s board members were not even nominated, and Mentor added two new board members. I chatted with Keith Barnes after the meeting and he has a solid background in EDA, test and semi.
Keith Barnes
Keith Barnes is Chairman of Verigy US Inc., a Cupertino-based company that designs, develops and manufactures advanced test systems and solutions for the semiconductor industry. From 2003 through 2006, he was Chairman and CEO of Electroglas, Inc., having been brought in by the board to execute a turnaround of the manufacturer of integrated circuit probers. Prior to that he was Chairman and CEO of Integrated Measurement Systems, a leader in digital, mixed-signal and memory-IC verification, until its acquisition by Credence Systems Corporation in 2001. Before assuming his role at IMS, Mr. Barnes was a division president at Cadence Design Systems and at Valid Logic Systems. Just three years after earning his degree in Environmental Studies at San Jose State, he co-founded Kontron Electronics, Inc., which was acquired by BMW in 1985.
Mr. Barnes has served on numerous boards and industry associations during his career, including three terms as a regent of University of Portland. He is currently on the board of Cascade Microtech, Inc. He is an inaugural member of the College of Social Sciences’ Dean’s Circle and spoke on campus in November 2008 as part of the Alumni Association’s Alumni Legends Speaker Series.He and his wife Sharon have three children and live in Portland, Oregon.
Daniel McCranie
Since August 2002, Mr. McCranie has served as Chairman of the Board at Freescale Semi and since November 2001 as a Director of ON Semiconductor Corporation, a supplier of high performance silicon solutions for energy efficient electronics. From October 2008 to September 2010, Mr. McCranie served as Executive Chairman of Virage Logic, a provider of application optimized semiconductor intellectual property platforms. Previously, Mr. McCranie served at Virage Logic as President and Chief Executive Officer from January 2007 to October 2008, Executive Chairman from March 2006 to January 2007, and Chairman of the Board of Directors from August 2003 to March 2006. From 1993 until his retirement in 2001, Mr. McCranie was employed in various positions, including as Executive Vice President, Marketing and Sales, with Cypress Semiconductor Corporation, a supplier of diversified, broadline semiconductor products, focusing on the communications industry. Mr. McCranie has been a member of the board of directors of Cypress Semiconductor since February 2005. From April 2004 to October 2010, Mr. McCranie served on the board of directors of Actel Corporation, a designer and provider of field programmable gate arrays and programmable system chips. From 1986 to 1993, Mr. McCranie was President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of SEEQ Technology, Inc., a manufacturer of semiconductor devices. In addition to On Semiconductor, Cypress Semiconductor and Virage Logic, within the past ten years, Mr. McCranie has served on the board of directors of Xicor, Inc., Actel Corporation, ASAT Holdings, California Microdevices and Actel Corporation.
Shareholder Meeting
Wally Rhines started the meeting promptly at 10AM and the formal part of the meeting was completed in just 5 minutes. Dean Freed presented the share holder introductions and noted that:
All four matters up for vote were accepted:
[LIST=1]
Wally thanked Jose Maria Alapont and Gary Meyers for their board service, now that is a classy goodbye for two former board members.
EDA Presentation
Wally had a handful of slides to overview what EDA is all about. Some nuggets I found:
Q&A
Q: Synopsys and Cadence both bought IP and Verification IP companies, will Mentor follow in this direction?
A: Mentor did invest in 1994, acquired, grew, then sold business. No plans to grow that market segment again.
Q: Do you have any concern about Chinese EDA competitors?
A: Mentor is the largest EDA supplier in China now, Korea and India. We’ve been succesfull in growing EDA in China. Piracy protection is always a concern.
Q: Synopsys and Magma comments?
A: Magma was a small player, we already compete with them, and didn’t want to participate in a bid for Magma.
Labor Union
A member from the local AFL-CIO read a prepared statement and recommend a no vote on board member David Schecter because he supports Icahn’s plan to sell the company. Labor does not not want Mentor to accept any offers from Ican to buy the company. (Applause)
Summary
I counted about 43 people in attendance today (about half of last years number) and the mood was upbeat and confident, quite the contrast with the takeover drama from last year. Wally Rhines is excited about the industry transition to 20nm and the research on 14nm, who knows maybe we will see EUV being used in production.
Mentor is poised to outperform the general EDA growth rate in calendar 2012 and the new board members should provide some positive industry insight.
Atrenta have put out a mysterious press release, a sort of teaser for what they are up to at DAC.
The first part is that they have an interview program at their booth (#2230) on the show floor where customers, partners and investors will talk about SpyGlass. Current speakers are:
But the more curious part is that Atrenta will be unveiling a new brand identity during the show. Mike Gianfagna says:“Over the years, Atrenta has built a very strong franchise for RTL analysis with its SpyGlass product family. That recognition and product loyalty simply cannot be bought, it must be earned. We are featuring the SpyGlass brand as part of Atrenta’s new identity.”
So my guess is that the company is going to be renamed in some way to incorporate the Spyglass name too, since it probably has better brand recognition than Atrenta itself. And the “SpyGlass Clean” stamp of approval makes more sense that way.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Atrenta’s DAC page is here.
What is Oasys up to this year? For the last three years they have only had videos outside of their demo suite. The first year was a rock video, featuring Joe Costello (chairman off the board) and the executive management. The second year was parodies of the Mac vs PC ads with no prizes for guessing which one Oasys was. And last year was the surfing video filmed down at Santa Cruz. The real capability of RealTime Designer was only on view in the suite.
This year Oasys are letting anyone see the technology. Xilinx and Intel Capital just invested in Oasys. Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Broadcom (via its Netlogic acquisition) are all users. These are the top US semiconductor companies and they are taping out some of the most difficult designs, right here, right now.
So come by and see a brief presentation about Chip Synthesis. You can even win something. No, not an iPad, something cooler. And there are a couple of demo stations to see the technology in action.
Oasys RealTime Designer reads in the entire design, along with the floorplan. The whole RTL is partitioned, already using coarse placement information in timing and congestion analysis. At all times a fully detailed netlist of each RTL partition is available and is used to accurately time the design. Next, to optimize the design and meet the design constraints, rather than starting to directly operate on these gates (as with traditional synthesis), the original RTL partitions are re-synthesized given their current physical and timing constraints. On top of that, the RTL partitions themselves will get merged, repartitioned and replaced in order to meet timing constraints and reduce any congestion. In a final refine step all gates get a legal placement. This approach, avoiding the step of optimizing a gate-level netlist which makes up most of the run-time of traditional synthesis, generates better results 10-20 times faster.
Oasys are at booth 530. To register for a suite demo go here. To see the presentation or see a demo on the show floor you just need to turn up.
OTT stands for “over the top”. But in the telecom sense it does not mean outrageous, it means providing a service using the data network that competes with some service that the carrier offers and uses as a revenue stream. The most obvious of these is running Skype and so not making a voice call but perhaps the biggest threat is messaging services. After all, young people rarely use their phones for making calls anyway, and even old fogies like me send more and more text messages.
In fact there are over 6 trillion text messages sent per year, according to the ITU (2010 data). That’s 17 billion per day, or 2½ for every person on the planet (including babies and other people who don’t have phones). Retrevo in the UK reported that 10% of young people in Britain think it is OK to send a text message while having sex.
If you have an iPhone and you send a “text” to another iPhone then it will show up in blue not green. This means that in fact you didn’t send a text at all. Apple simply bypassed the carrier and used the data service to transfer whatever you typed. Except to the extent that this uses a miniscule amount of your data cap (which is measured in gigabytes per month) the carrier gets nothing. For a text they get several cents depending on what sort of plan you are on, more if it crosses an international frontier. In the same way, if you use Whatsapp or similar messaging services (Skype, AIM, Blackberry Messenger etc) the carrier is cut out of the loop. It is their worst nightmare, being reduced to a dumb pipe.
Texting is huge. And hugely profitable. How big? Texting is as big as handsets. That’s right, carriers make as much revenue selling text messaging services as they do selling handsets. They make about a quarter of their revenue on the hardware side. Of the remaining $1T in service revenue, 85% comes from voice and text messaging.
But texts require essentially no bandwidth and so have minimal cost. As a result they are very profitable. How profitable: 45% of carrier profits (another 50% comes from voice calls and just 5% from everything else). This is perhaps a bit distorted since handsets are sold at a loss in some countries such as the US, and it is made up on the service revenue, but the bottom line is that nearly half the profits of the network operators (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Vodaphone, Orange, China Mobile etc) comes from text messaging.
Here is an interviewfrom a couple of weeks ago with Randal Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T in which he says:“You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model. Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”
To make it worse, it turns out that the heaviest users (young people, people who travel a lot, people communicating internationally where text messaging has a premium price) are the most likely to use these services that bypass the carrier. A similar phenomenon happens with voice. Carriers make a lot of their voice profits on international calls, since the rates are outrageous and they don’t even pretend to compete on price. But those are exactly the calls most likely to be bypassed by users switching to Skype instead and creating no revenue at all (for anyone, not even Microsoft who owns Skype these days).
So if people are making fewer voice calls and texting more, and more and more of the texting is bypassing the carriers then how does the system hang together. With next generation LTE networks, there won’t really much of a technical distinction between the carrier’s voice and Skype, or the carrier’s text message and Apple’s iMessage. They are all carried over the same packet switched infrastructure. There will no longer be a separate voice channel and a separate channel for text messages (which were originally only intended for network administration). It is just the billing that is different. The carriers are desperate to find a way to make more money than just providing a data service that smart hardware uses to deliver premium services such as voice in which the carrier doesn’t get a cut.
Since the cost of all the network infrastructure (base stations, backhaul, billing etc) has to be paid for out of carrier revenue, expect data rates to go up a lot and voice/text rates to come down. At least that’s my prediction. And they had better or the carriers won’t be able to afford to (indirectly) buy all those chips that go into smartphones and the base stations to serve them. Or alternatively the carriers will successfully block certain services such as Skype (indeed one carrier in Sweden already excludes use of Skype from their fixed price data bundle).
Clever title but it’s not mine. Piper Jaffray Analysts Auguste Richard and Jennifer Baxter released a report last week which echoed the concerns of others, including myself. The concerns reported are with the 22nm process and not the chipsets themselves. To me this is all part of ramping a leading edge process but the concerns are real and should be discussed.
Continue reading “Intel’s Tri-Gate May Have Moore Problems Than You Think!”
I first met Stuart at Mentor Graphics back in 1995 or so, and he is one of the most knowledgable persons around for all things Verilog.
Stuart Sutherland is the editor for the IEEE 1800 SystemVerilog standard, so if you’re attending DAC and care about SystemVerilog then consider attending the Birds of a Feather meeting held 7 to 8 PM Tuesday evening, room 306.
There will be a presentation summarizing the many significant new features that have been added to SystemVerilog, followed by informal discussion on the importance and proper application of these new features in design and verification projects. The presentation will be by Stuart Sutherland, editor of the IEEE 1800 SystemVerilog standard, and expert trainer of using SystemVerilog. Please invite any SystemVerilog users or tool developers who will be at DAC to attend this session. The DAC link for this meeting is: http://www.dac.com/additional+meetings.aspx?event=355&topic=5
