The Week In Review: May 31


By Ed Sperling Mentor Graphics and GlobalFoundries teamed up to deliver 20nm design kits that include Mentor’s place and route tool, including verification and conflict resolution engines for double-patterning violations. The 20nm process is used for GlobalFoundries’ 14nm finFETs. Mentor also received 16nm finFET certification from TSMC for the same tools plus its physical verification pl... » read more

The X Factor


By Ed Sperling The number of unknowns is growing in every segment of SoC design all the way through manufacturing, raising the stakes between reliability and the tradeoffs necessary to meet market windows. Tools are available to deal with some of these unknowns, or X’s, but certainly not all of them. Moreover, no single tool can handle all unknowns, some of which can build upon other unkn... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Internet Of Everything


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss the Internet of Things with Jack Guedj, president and CEO of Tensilica; John Heinlein, vice president of marketing for the physical IP division of ARM; Kamran Izadi, director of sourcing and supplier management at Cisco; and Oleg Logvinov, director of market development for STMicroelectronics’ Industrial and Power Conversion Division. Wh... » read more

Experience Required


Many prominent semiconductor, EDA and IP companies are acknowledging the influence of user-experience design methodologies and technologies on their business. Experiences are the evolution of commoditization (chip hardware) and customization (software). But many design engineers remain cautious about the actual application of experiences to their work. What is driving this emphasis on expe... » read more

The (R)evolution Of Intelligent IP Subsystems


IP subsystems have gone from talking point to reality in a very short period of time, but most coverage focuses on a hardware integrators view. The system integrator’s view is very different because the task of software integration is now vastly more complex dealing with software from multiple providers, using different assumptions and with different requirements. This effort, already larger ... » read more

FinFET Technology


This white paper discusses the major challenges with FinFETs and how TSMC has been collaborating with Synopsys, one of their ecosystem partners, to deliver a complete solution. Key elements of this solution include comprehensive FinFET profiling without impact to design tool runtime and proven, verified IP availability. The TSMC 16-nm FinFET solution will ensure mutual customers swiftly move to... » read more

Taking Aim At Big Data


By Ed Sperling As the Internet of Things bridges the gap between the mobile and big data worlds, EDA and IP vendors increasingly are looking well beyond their usual boundaries. How successful they are at moving upward into a market that is far less price-sensitive remains to be seen. But from a technology standpoint, at least, the issues encountered by data centers and cloud providers are ... » read more

GF’S Two Flavors Of FD-SOI


Posted by Adele Hars, Editor-in-Chief, Advanced Substrate News ~  ~ Hearing the news that GlobalFoundries would be offering two flavors of FD-SOI, ASN asked the company to explain the strategy further. Here are the responses provided by Subi Kengeri, Vice President of Advanced Technology Architecture.   [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="110"] Subi Kengeri, VP Advanced T... » read more

Optimizing IP For Power


By Ed Sperling As the amount of commercial IP in an SoC increases, the entire bill of materials is coming under increasing scrutiny because of a new concern—power. Commercial IP, after all, is largely a collection of black-box solutions to speed up the time it takes to bring a chip to market, and frequently to improve the quality, but the cumulative impact on the system power budget has neve... » read more

Executive Briefing: Lip-Bu Tan


By Ed Sperling LPHP: From a high level, what are your customers doing differently these days? Tan: What system companies are looking for is time-to-market and differentiation. They want to differentiate on specific functions. IT has become very important in this process. And in terms of tools, they are looking for end-to-end solutions. Besides the advanced nodes and IP blocks, they are starti... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →