Leti Looks at Using Strain with FD-SOI for High-Perf Apps


The researchers at Leti working on FD-SOI have extremely deep expertise in it. One of the areas they've looked at is performance boosters. With the interest in FD-SOI rapidly increasing on the heels of the recent ST-GF announcement, their work becomes even more timely. A key Leti team wrote a summary of some recent strain work, which first appeared as part of the Advanced Substra... » 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

GloFo to Fab 28/20nm FD-SOI for ST; ST Tech Open to GF Customers


Two big pieces of news have recently been announced by STMicroelectronics: to supplement in-house production at Crolles, the company has tapped GlobalFoundries for high-volume production of 28nm then 20nm FD-SOI mobile devices; ST will open access to its FD-SOI technology to GlobalFoundries’ other customers. The high-volume manufacturing will kick off with ST-Ericsson’s ARM-based 2... » read more

Power Shift


By Ed Sperling For the past decade, most of the real gains in energy efficiency were developed for chips inside mobile electronics because of the demand for longer battery life. Dark silicon now represents the majority of mobile devices, multiple power islands are commonplace to push many functions into deep sleep, and performance is usually the secondary concern for most applications. Whil... » read more

New Challenges, New Name


As you’ll notice today, we’ve changed our name from Low Power Engineering to Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering. We don’t take name changes lightly—we've been discussing this in depth with readers, sponsors, and researchers for the past six months. The almost universal conclusion is there is a big shift underway in the semiconductor industry today, and our new logo is a better refle... » read more

Experts At The Table: Black Belt Power Management


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With approximately 80% of SoC content reused from past designs or brought in from internal and external IP sources, a significant part of a design engineer’s job today is writing glue logic and verifying to make sure the integrated system communicates as dictated by the specification. Integration challenges continue to mount with the increasing amount of black ... » read more

Efficiency Vs. Accuracy


By Barry Pangrle If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I wrote an article, Power vs. Accuracy, last year that discussed tradeoffs between power and accuracy for different applications. It turns out that for a number of processing applications, if every bit isn’t perfect, the impact on the final result might not be all that great. Anyone performing financial analytical... » read more

ST-Ericsson 28nm FD-SOI smartphone SOC, Q3 tape-out (interview)


ASN recently had a chance to talk to ST-Ericsson’s Chief Chip Architect Louis Tannyeres  about the move to 28nm FD-SOI for smartphones and tablet SOCs.  Take-away message:  FD-SOI solves – with less process complexity – scaling, leakage and variability issues to further shrink CMOS technology beyond 28nm. Here's what he said. ~~ [caption id="attachment_441" align="alignleft" wi... » read more

FD-SOI Workshop ppts – STM’s 1st 28nm FD-SOI product line


The SOI Consortium’s 6th FD-SOI workshop, held just after ISSCC, yielded some exciting news. Most of the presentations are freely available for downloading from the SOI Consortium website. Here are the highlights. STMicroelectronics In a terrific presentation by Giorgio Cesana, Marketing Director at STMicroelectronics, he revealed that the company would be releasing a major product line b... » read more

Synthesis: Next Steps In SoC Design


Five experts sound off to System-Level Design on the state of synthesis and what's needed in the future: Shawn McCloud, product line director for Catapult C Synthesis at Mentor Graphics; Chris Eddington, director of marketing for system-lvel products at Synopsys; Brett Cline, VP of marketing at Forte Design Systems; Andy Biddle, director of business development at Magma and Sanjiv Kaul, executi... » read more

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