The Ins And Outs Of Directed Self-Assembly


By Mark LaPedus H.S. Phillip Wong, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and one of the leading experts on directed self-assembly (DSA) technology, sat down to discuss the future of this approach with Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design. With funding from the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), Stanford is exploring contact-hole patterning and the design infrastructur... » 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

Reducing Circuitry To Reduce Power


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Power is at the top of the list of concerns for design teams today. Consequently, engineers are constantly looking at new techniques and architectural approaches to lower and management the power and energy consumption of their devices. This has resulted in some incredible engineering feats, turning parts of a device on and off as needed, applying different volta... » 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

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 Da... » 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

The Brave New World Of Modeling TSVs


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With 2D ICs the prevailing notion has been that wire parasitics are relatively self-contained with the exception of very advanced designs running at hundreds of gigahertz. For the most part, the package designer and IC designer lived in their own separate worlds. With the advent of chip stacking using through silicon vias (TSVs), those worlds are being thrust together... » read more

EDA’s Cloudy Vision


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Since the dawn of EDA, the industry has largely operated under a traditional software distribution model whereby the customer would run the software it licensed on its own hardware equipment. With the sophistication of advanced IT management techniques as well as education surrounding “The Cloud,” it may be safe to predict that engineers in the not-to-distant futu... » read more

System-Level Models Redefined


By Ann Steffora Mutschler It wasn’t that long ago that the promise of system-level models was an easy implementation path and the ability to then reuse the models in a different design, for a different target application. But how reusable are those models in reality? The answer depends on whom you ask. First, it is important to define what a system-level model is, noted Frank Schirrmeiste... » read more

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