Inside The System-Level Supply Chain


System-Level Design sat down to discuss supply chain issues with Bill Chown product marketing director for the system-level engineering division at Mentor Graphics and a longtime participant in a number of standards efforts across the semiconductor design industry. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: What’s happening with system engineering as chip design/manufacturing mo... » read more

Changes In The Supply Chain


Runaway complexity in design, implementation, verification and manufacturing is being mirrored across an increasingly complex supply chain. Now the question is what to do about it. Complexity is being driven by the continued shrinking of feature sizes and the clamor for more functionality to leverage the real estate that becomes available with each new process node. But the increased density... » read more

Fixing The Supply Chain


For all the promise and subsequent anxiety about moving to the next process node or stacking die, the real problem isn’t technology. It isn’t even cost per transistor. It’s who will take responsibility when something goes wrong. Notice the word “when” rather than “if.” Rising complexity means that chips no longer can be fully verified, so errors are a given. Some errors are wor... » read more

Virtual IDM Progress Report


By Ed Sperling Complexity, tight power budgets, disaggregation of the supply chain and market fragmentation are conspiring to force much tighter partnerships among companies that develop different pieces of an SoC, as well as those that collaborate on even larger systems. This confluence of factors has forced the rules for how companies work together to be rewritten, but even within that frame... » read more

Commoditizing Green


Over the past five decades, Moore’s Law has been a powerful guiding principle for shrinking process geometries and improving performance. But with performance now considered secondary to energy and power efficiency, the same forces that have worked to commoditize performance increases while slashing costs will be applied to saving battery life and drawing less energy from the wall. This i... » read more

Cyclical Behavior


As we head into yet another DAC, this may seem like a bad case of déjà vu. While there’s plenty of new stuff—and even some new companies—there are some key trends that seem very familiar. Here are four to consider: 1. Cloud computing. For anyone who’s old enough to remember time-sharing on university computers, cloud computing should look very familiar. The scheduling is more so... » read more

Effects Unknown


f you really want to know what’s going on inside the IC design world, pick up a copy of the annual reports of the largest foundries. Then triangulate that with the earnings reports of the largest makers of computers and mobile electronics and the makers of EDA tools and IP. All three areas are experiencing a massive uptick, which is good news considering the travails of the past couple of ... » read more

Wafer Demand Grows Despite Supply Chain Jitters


By Joanne Itow Semiconductor revenue growth broke records in 2010 increasing almost 32% over 2009.  Units grew an equally impressive 25% forcing manufacturers to increase productivity and ramp up additional capacity as quickly as possible. Increased use of leading edge process technology was evident as products processed at 45nm and smaller grew to 16.8% of the total silicon demand in 2010... » read more

Road Construction Ahead


A long-running joke in Canada is there are only two seasons—winter and road repair. Dating back from the days of ancient times, roads have united empires. In a more figurative sense, they have made the best corporations better than their competitors. And on a conceptual level, they have linked together theories and concepts that previously had functioned in separate worlds. In SoC d... » read more

Value Shift


System Level Design talks with Tom Quan of TSMC, John Koeter of Synopsys, Kalar Rajendiran of eSilicon and Phil Yastrow of Avago about where the value has shifted in the semiconductor design chain and why. [youtube vid=MvSaHSYDqVQ] » read more

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