Experts At The Table: Yield And Reliability Issues With Integrating IP


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of integrating IP in complex SoCs with Juan Rey, senior director of engineering at Mentor Graphics; Kevin Yee, product marketing director for Cadence’s SoC Realization Group; and Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at eSilicon. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: As more pieces are integrated into complex SoCs... » read more

What Just Happened?


Boy that went by fast. One minute, I’m waking up a little groggy on New Year’s Day, wondering whether the silicon industry is ever going to rebound. The next minute, it’s today and the industry had a good year, and is, in many ways, a completely different animal than it was 12 months ago. Innovation is evolutionary, sure. But if you really think about 2013, you can make an argument tha... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 11


Synopsys’ Brent Gregory has developed a career growth checklist for computer science majors. They should hang this in the hallway at universities. Cadence’s Brian Fuller interviews Saar Drimer, a UK hardware engineer who has been experimenting with odd-shaped PCBs. According to Drimer, 45-degree angles aren’t always optimal. But what happens to all the expensive tools everyone has bee... » read more

Experts At The Table: What’s Missing In The IoT


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of the IoT with Oleg Logvinov, director of market development for STMicroelectronics’ Industrial and Power Conversion Division; Martin Lund, senior vice president of the IP Group at Cadence; Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; and Damon Hernandez, a member of the Web3D Consortium. What follows are excerpts of that conver... » read more

The Path To Power Signoff Is Getting Longer


Signoff on power used to be a fairly simple check-the-box kind of activity. Even if power budgets weren’t exactly met, they could usually be fixed in future iterations of a chip, whether that involved derivatives or new revs of the same chip. A number of things have changed since the much simpler days of 45/40nm and above, however. Power is now a market differentiator. In many cases, i... » read more

What’s Next For Power Optimization


Today it is difficult to find a design that does not consider some kind of power optimization. Mobile needs it to preserve battery life, data centers need it to reduce operating cost, and many are finding they need it to meet tougher regulatory requirements. In a survey conducted two years ago, there was no segment of the industry that was not taking a serious look at reducing their power profi... » read more

New Challenges Emerge With FinFETs


Working at advanced process nodes is always tricky. There are new things to worry about and more rules to deal with initially, yet the promised benefit is improved performance, power and area, or cost. But at the next process node, and the one after that, there are so many variables coming into play that trying to make sense of the PPA equation is becoming much more difficult. Early reports ... » read more

Thermally Challenged


Chips run hot and the thermal densities increase with every reduction in fabrication geometry. “When we go down to 16nm the local power density increases by 25% and the local gate density also increases by 25% to 30%,” explains Norman Chang, vice president of product strategy at Ansys/Apache. In fact, this is becoming such a large problem that it is affecting the scaling process itsel... » read more

Seven Ways To Improve PPA Before Moving To FinFETs


Henry Ford wrote in his autobiography, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” And for decades, the semiconductor industry has marched to a similar theme set by Moore’s Law. But with the transition to finFETs harder than it first appeared, questions are beginning to pop up that is fueling a new level of confusion. While the growing list of... » read more

Powerful Software Optimization


It is commonly accepted that the higher you go in the design chain, the bigger the impact that design and implementation decision can have. While power optimization may have started deep in the silicon, the success of a product, such a smart phone, often is based on the time between charges. Batteries provide a finite energy resource, and while low-level optimization may focus on power reductio... » read more

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