Leveraging The Past


By Ann Steffora Mutschler It’s easy to forget that not every design today is targeted at 20nm, given the amount of focus put on the bleeding edge of technology. But in fact a large number of designs utilize the stability and reliability of older manufacturing nodes, as well as lower mask costs, by incorporating new design and verification techniques, with 2.5D designs being a prime example. ... » read more

The Trouble With Models


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Models and modeling concepts seem to be on the tip of every tongue these days. Once the promise of sparking true ESL design, the use of system-level models has settled into something more like enabling software development. There is also talk of leveraging models across the supply chain, but is this really possible yet? The concept of doing this incremental refinem... » read more

Merger In Progress


By Jon McDonald June's been an interesting month, I was at the Design Automation Conference, DAC, in San Francisco, then a week later, the Freescale Technology Forum, FTF. DAC is generally more of a hardware design conference, while FTF generally is a bit more focused on software and systems. This year I was surprised at the similarities in some of the discussions at both shows. At DAC ther... » read more

High Speed PCB Layout: Physical Design Issues Of Highspeed Interfaces


Moore’s law, applied to data rates, has pushed PCB circuits so fast that the layout becomes part of the circuit. In designs such as DDR3 and PCIe, the fastest memory and high-speed serial performance comes with very specific physical layout requirements that are not obvious. Unless you are thinking like an RF designer, there are many unexpected challenges to a successful high-speed layout. A ... » read more

Experts At The Table: IP Subsystems


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss the transition to IP subsystems with Kevin Meyer, vice president of design enablement strategy and alliances at GlobalFoundries; Steve Roddy, vice president of marketing at Tensilica; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atrenta; and Adam Kablanian, CEO of Memoir Systems. What follows are excerpts of that con... » read more

Experts At The Table: Multipatterning


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Michael White, physical verification product line manager at Mentor Graphics; Luigi Capodieci, R&D fellow at GlobalFoundries; Lars Liebmann, IBM distinguished engineer; Rob Aitken, ARM fellow; Jean-Pierre Geronimi, CAD director at STMicroelectronics; and Kuang-Kuo Lin, director of foundry design enablement at Samsung Ele... » read more

Fallback Plans


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With EUV lithography missing a few deadlines already, the semiconductor industry has begun to search for alternatives. None of these solutions is simple, of course, and it’s questionable whether they’re even economically viable. And even if EUV is ready for mass production by 14nm, there are new challenges that have to be dealt with—particularly in the space... » read more

Model-Based Double-Dipole Lithography For Sub-30nm Node Device


As the optical lithography advances into the sub-30nm technology node, the various candidates of lithography have been discussed. Double dipole lithography (DDL) has been a primary lithography candidate due to the advantages of a simpler process and a lower mask cost compared to the double patterning lithography (DPL). However, new DDL requirements have been also emerged to improve the process ... » read more

What’s ST’s FD-SOI Technology All About?


As I blogged here on SemiMD last week, STMicroelectronics has announced that to supplement in-house production at their fab in Crolles, the company has tapped GlobalFoundries for high-volume production of 28nm then 20nm FD-SOI mobile devices.  ST will also open access to its FD-SOI technology to GlobalFoundries’ other customers.  High-volume manufacturing will kick off with ST-Ericsson’s ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Improving The Efficiency Of Software


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Design sat down to talk about how to write better software with Jan Rabaey, Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professor at the University of California at Berkeley; Barry Pangrle, solutions architect for low-power design and verification at Mentor Graphics; Emily Shriver, research scientist at Intel; Alan Gibbons, principal engineer at Synopsys; and Dav... » read more

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