If you are in Europe then the CDNLive! EMEA user conference is in Munich at the Dolce Hotel from May 14th to 16th. Like last month's CDNLive! in Cadence's hometown San Jose, the conference focuses on sharing fresh ideas and best practices for... read more

Do you need more servers? Do you need more licenses? If you are kicking off a verification run of 10,000 jobs on 1,000 server cores then you are short of 9000 cores and 9000 licenses, but you'd be insane to rush out with a purchase order just... read more

TSMC just finished the Q1 conference call. I will let the experts haggle over the wording of the financial analysis, but the big news is that TSMC 28nm Q1 revenue was 5%, beating my guess of 4%. So all of you who bet against TSMC 28nm its time to pay up! Coincidentally, Im in Las Vegas where... read more

Mentor announced the latest version of their Veloce emulator at the Globalpress briefing in Santa Cruz. The announcement is in two parts. The first is that they have designed a new custom... read more

UPDATE: there is free WiFi on all buses.

OK, these are not the 128 bit 1GHz buses we have to hear about every day. They go roughly 40 miles in roughly an hour. But they take you from Silicon Valley to DAC and back, and they are cheaper... read more

Chris Rowen, Tensilica's CTO, presented in Santa Cruz at the Globalpress briefing. He was basically presenting Tensilica's audio strategy, which I've written about before. But he provided an interesting perspective.... read more

The biggest news out of the TSMC Symposium last week was the 20nm update. Lots of debate and speculation, just why is TSMC releasing one version of 20nm (20nm SoC) versus multiple versions like in 40nm (LP, G, LPG) and 28nm (HP, HPM, HPL, LP)? Here are my thoughts, I would also be interested in your feedback in the comment section. This really... read more

Who doesnt love the perennial Hogans Heros panel at DAC? Always provocative and illuminating, for technologists, entrepreneurs, and strategists.

At DAC 2012, Jim Hogans panel is Learning from Apple:... read more

Back in the early days of ASIC when we had just two and then (wow!) three layers of metal, place and route was done by putting the standard cells in rows with gaps between them and then using a specialized... read more

The big three vendors in EDA offer AMS simulation tools but what about simulation choices from other EDA vendors?

It turns out there are two privately held EDA companies that have done business since the 1980's and have just integrated a Verilog A simulator with a SPICE circuit simulator. The two companies are Aldec with a Verilog A simulator and Tanner EDA with... read more

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It's been 34 years since I graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Electrical Engineering so I was curious about what has changed in quantum physics since then. Alastair Rae is the UK-based author who wrote the book - Quantum Physics: A Beginner's Guide. I read this on my ...

How could I talk about the various Interface protocols (PCIe, USB, MIPI, DDRn) from an IP perspective and miss the PHY IP! Especially these days, where the PHY IP market has been seriously shacked, as we will see in this post, and will probably continue to be shacked but we will have to wait and look at the M&A news during the next few weeks or so.

Before looking at these business related movements, doing some quick evangelization about what exactly is a PHY. The acronym comes ...

At the GSA 3D IC working group meeting, Cadence presented their perspective on 3D ICs. Their view will turn out to be important since the new chair of the 3D IC working group is going to be Ken Potts of Cadence. Once GSA decided the position could not be funded then an independent consultant like Herb Reiter had to bow out and the position would need to be taken by someone funded ...

Apple sells devices. Lots of them. Their success is due to many things related to design and tech religion, and an important part is the SoC inside those devices which creates the experience people want. The official Apple information on their parts is minimal. Their SoCs have been dissected with more fervor than Roswell aliens. We know some but not every detail, but connecting the dots of some history tells more of the story. ...

At 28nm and below, a number of electrical variation effects become significant which depend not only on individual devices, but the physical interaction between neighboring devices, wells, etc during the manufacturing process. Some of these effects have become collectively referred to as Layout Dependent Effects (LDE); including the well-proximity effect, shallow trench isolation stress and a few others. Similar concerns include poly density, whose magnitude and variation can also affect device performance.

These effects are not easily predicted in circuit design, because they ...

There is an interesting discussion in the SemiWiki forum in response to the EETimes article: Intel exec says fabless model 'collapsing'. Definitely an interesting debate, one worth our time since the advertising click hungry industry pundits will certainly jump all over it. Clearly Im biased since I helped build the semiconductor ecosystem. I will certainly try and be open minded here, but ...