8 Checks That Every PCB Designer Needs To Achieve Electrical Sign-Off


Automate electrical design rule checking (DRC) for fast, cost-effective PCB design verification. These eight rules apply regardless of your PCB layout tool or level of expertise. To read more, click here. » read more

Next EUV Issue: Mask 3D Effects


As extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography moves closer to production, the industry is paying more attention to a problematic phenomenon called mask 3D effects. Mask 3D effects involve the photomask for EUV. In simple terms, a chipmaker designs an IC, which is translated from a file format into a photomask. The mask is a master template for a given IC design. It is placed in a lithography scan... » read more

New Market Drivers


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changing market dynamics with Steve Mensor, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22926" e_name="Achronix"]; Apurva Kalia, vice president of R&D in the System and Verification group of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Mohammed Kassem, CTO for [getentity id="22910" comment="efabless"]; Matthew Ballance, product engineer and techn... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 25


Mentor's Cristian Filip digs into SerDes design with a focus on the adoption and evolution of Channel Operating Margin (COM) as a tool for ensuring compliance of high-speed designs and why it's useful even if its mathematical procedure might be intimidating at the beginning. Cadence's Paul McLellan explains the importance of IBIS and AMI standards for SerDes design and why the upcoming DDR5 ... » read more

Design Rule Complexity Rising


Variation, edge placement error, and a variety of other issues at new process geometries are forcing chipmakers and EDA vendors to confront a growing volume of increasingly complex, and sometimes interconnected design rules to ensure chips are manufacturable. The number of rules has increased to the point where it's impossible to manually keep track of all of them, and that has led to new pr... » read more

New Patterning Options Emerging


Several fab tool vendors are rolling out the next wave of self-aligned patterning technologies amid the shift toward new devices at 10/7nm and beyond. Applied Materials, Lam Research and TEL are developing self-aligned technologies based on a variety of new approaches. The latest approach involves self-aligned patterning techniques with multi-color material schemes, which are designed for us... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 18


Cadence's Meera Collier provides an overview of five emerging technologies that could drive the semiconductor industry in the future, from carbon nanotubes to quantum computing. Mentor's Colin Walls reminds embedded software developers of a few common sense tips, including better readability with braces in C/C++ and monitoring stack overflow. Synopsys' Tim Mackey rounds up the last few we... » read more

What Happened To UPF?


Two years ago there was a lot of excitement, both within the industry and the standards communities, about rapid advancements that were being made around low-power design, languages and methodologies. Since then, everything has gone quiet. What happened? At the time, it was reported that the [gettech id="31043" comment="IEEE 1801"] committee was the largest active committee within the IEEE. ... » read more

Power-Aware Intent And Structural Verification Of Low-Power Designs


In Part 1 of this series on power aware (PA) verification, we examined the foundations and verification features of PA static checks. In Part 2, we will discuss the features of the static verification library and describe best static verification practices. Library for Static Verifications Cell-level and pin-level attributes from Liberty are mandatorily required for accurate PA-Static verif... » read more

Processing Moves To The Edge


Edge computing is evolving from a relatively obscure concept into an increasingly complex component of a distributed computing architecture, in which processing is being shifted toward end devices and satellite data facilities and away from the cloud. Edge computing has gained attention in two main areas. One is the [getkc id="78" kc_name="industrial IoT"], where it serves as a do-it-yoursel... » read more

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