Foundries Expand Planar Efforts


Competition is heating up in the leading-edge foundry business, as vendors begin to ramp up their new 16nm/14nm finFET processes. But that’s not the only action in the foundry arena. They are also expanding their efforts in the leading-edge planar market by rolling out new 28nm and 22nm processes. On one front, TSMC is offering new 28nm variants, based on bulk CMOS technology. And on an... » read more

FinFET And Multi-Patterning Aware Place And Route Implementation


The use of finFETs and multi-patterning has a huge impact on the entire physical implementation flow. This paper outlines the new challenges in placement, routing, optimization, and physical verification and describes how the Olympus-SoC place and route system handles them. To read more, click here. » read more

Case Studies In Double-Patterning Debug


Double patterning (DP) impacts just about every part of the design and manufacturing flows. However, the kinds of issues you encounter, the way they manifest themselves, and the ideal way to address them may be very different in different parts of these flows. I feel like I have spent a lot of time the last six months or so working with place and route (P&R) and chip finishing engineers on DP i... » read more

Power Verification Now Required


Today’s verification tasks may seem daunting — and much of it is — but all of it is absolutely necessary to make sure chips operate properly with a larger system. Throw power into the mix and the challenges mount. The good news is that there is no shortage of tools and methodologies to help with these tasks. The bad news is that even the best tools won’t make the challenges disappear... » read more

Blog Review: June 17


Can big data help farmers produce bigger crops? From Iowa to Indonesia, Rambus' Aharon Etengoff looks at programs combining sensors, drones, and analytics where narrowing the odds of the next catastrophic crop failure is just the beginning. Forget any preconceptions you might have about the non-profit sector, says ARM's Dominic Vergine. UNICEF's global procurement hub looks and runs like an ... » read more

Consolidation And Innovation


Consolidation is happening across the semiconductor industry, in ways that are very apparent and others that aren't so obvious. On the chipmaker side, NXP's acquisition of Freescale, Avago's acquisition of Broadcom and LSI, and Intel's acquisition of Altera are so big that they require approval by multiple governments. Less obvious are moves such as Apple's build out of its processor team, a... » read more

SoC Integration Headaches Grow


As the number of IP blocks grows, so do the headaches of integrating the various pieces and making sure they perform as planned within a prescribed power envelope. This is easier said than done, particularly at the most advanced process nodes. There are more blocks, more power domains, more states and use-model dependencies, and there is much more contention for memories. There are physical ... » read more

New Directions For EDA


DAC is over and everyone is asking – what was the theme this year? It is sometimes difficult to make such a determination because quite often the theme has been there for some time, but suddenly appears more obvious than it did in the past. Some years it is a new product or class of products. The theme also can remain hidden, or disguised. As an example, people have been talking about the ... » read more

Analog’s Day Of Reckoning


The numbers being touted by the semiconductor industry for IoT edge devices are staggering. How they are going to be used, who will make them, or indeed who will make money from them are much less certain. The industry seems to be clear about the content of these devices. A small processor, some flash memory or possibly even some of the new memory technologies that are coming along, a radio ... » read more

Early Power Budgeting for Live Applications


Today, power and energy efficiency are at the forefront of SoC design. Functional activity has a first-order impact on power. Increasing functional integration requires a comprehensive analysis of power consumption across complex modes of operation. Power inefficiency in any one mode can have a significant impact on the competitiveness of a product or time to market. So designers are looking fo... » read more

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