Viable Choices Ahead
Two years ago—basically one process node back, wherever companies were on the Moore’s Law road map—there was confusion about what lies ahead and what is the best way to proceed. During that time, three...
View ArticleMaking Things Better
For the better part of the past decade the focus in semiconductor design has been on improving energy efficiency—making batteries last longer and lowering the energy bills for data centers—and...
View ArticleBrother, Can You Spare An Electron?
Every now and then in semiconductor design we come to a crossroads where we have to start thinking about problems differently. At 10nm we will be forced to do that again. The problem—or opportunity,...
View ArticleMoore’s Law Revisited
Moore’s Law, for all its re-interpretation, remains an iconic economic statement about doubling transistors over a fixed period of time—despite the fact that the time frame has changed at least twice...
View ArticleMath Questions
The race is on. GlobalFoundries, TSMC, Samsung, IBM and Intel are all neck deep in research, test chips, variability, lithography and three-dimensional transistor designs. For the first time, though,...
View ArticleProving IP
As the amount of commercially available IP in a design increases, so does the level of confusion. Unlike those giant yellow stickers you get with a major appliance that tell you how much energy you’re...
View ArticleBit Mapping
The rule of thumb for semiconductor manufacturing is that big breakthroughs tend to last a decade, or about five process nodes. While the transistor already has spanned more than five decades and the...
View ArticleUnified Power Intent
The next version of the Unified Power Format has been approved, bridging the major differences between UPF/IEEE 1801 and the Common Power Format. For anyone who works in low-power verification, this is...
View ArticleLP Verification
Functional verification has been a consideration throughout the design flow for the past several process nodes. Low power verification has been more of an afterthought. That’s beginning to change,...
View ArticleLet The IP Wars Begin
By Ed Sperling Nature abhors a vacuum. Customers abhor a monopoly. It appears both problems are now being solved in the EDA world—assuming approval by regulatory agencies, of course. There have been...
View ArticleThrow In The Kitchen Sink
By Ed Sperling The number of options available for reducing power and improving performance are increasing for the first time in a decade. This is good news for chipmakers. It’s far less clear who...
View ArticleUncertainty Ahead
If finFETs work as planned, it’s likely they will show up in every complex SoC for decades to come. Adding another dimension to transistors has enormous potential at advanced nodes, and maybe even at...
View ArticleMachine Talk
The Internet of Things raises some interesting questions that have never been fully addressed in semiconductor design. For instance, how do you assess the necessary performance for any particular...
View ArticleMoving Targets
There is a very close correlation between power and complexity in an SoC. The more functionality that is required to meet market demands, the greater the need to push to the next process node in order...
View ArticleBig Iron Conundrums
Enormous attention is being focused on energy efficiency in mobile devices because time between charges trumps a slight boost in performance. Inside of data centers those benefits are far less clear....
View ArticlePushing The Limits
Ever since the turn of the millennium, researchers have been warning that wires and interconnects will have issues. Electron crashes were reported as early as 2001, and electromigration is rising to...
View ArticleIntel Vs. Everyone Else
A report from ABI Research is starting to gain some attention. For cynics, the question of why now seems perfectly reasonable, considering the report was released early last month and promptly fell...
View ArticleNext Phase Of Energy Efficiency Begins
Individual purchases and product rollouts by companies are difficult to assess by themselves. Sometimes they are isolated steps that have no context or connection to anything else—the proverbial...
View ArticleSolar In Context
What made Apple’s iPod a winner was business context. There were plenty of other MP3 players on the market and Apple’s wasn’t particularly noteworthy from a technology standpoint. But rather than just...
View ArticlePerformance Or Power?
For high-volume chips, such as those slated for mobile devices such as tablets or smart phones, energy efficiency is absolutely critical. For very high-value chips, which are the ones that show up in...
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