Monthly Archives: February 2009

No sex before marriage in EDA

In most businesses, every company doesn’t feel the need to make every product that it sells. When you buy a car from General Motors, they don’t make the ABS system themselves, they buy it from Delphi or from Bosch. When … Continue reading

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We’re driving in a fog

I went along to what used to be John Cooley’s EDA bigwigs panel and is now Peggy Aycinena’s “Is EDA dead or alive?” I had to keep asking myself am I dead or alive for the first part of the … Continue reading

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Guest blog: Grant Martin

Today’s guest blog is from Grant Martin, Chief scientist at Tensilica. He worked for Burroughs in Scotland (in Cumbernauld, of all places, which makes Newark look attractive), Nortel in Canada, and then at Cadence before moving to Tensilica. He literally … Continue reading

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Power again

Yesterday I promised an overview of what power reduction techniques are out there. First, a disclosure: I was interim CEO of Envis for about a year and I’ve done some consulting for Nanochronous. Firstly, there are two kinds of power: … Continue reading

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Blazing a trail

The mystery of whether Blaze DFM had closed down or not is over. It has been acquired by Tela Innovations mainly, it would seem, for the PowerTrim technology that had been licensed by TSMC. A major strategic relationship between Tela … Continue reading

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Power is the new timing

In the 1980s, chip design was focused on layout: cramming all those gates into as few chips as possible, trying make use of every square millimeter of silicon. The 1990s were the decade of timing, when all the tools became … Continue reading

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The all-purpose EDA keynote

I’ve given lots of keynote speeches about EDA over the years. You too can give your own keynote if you follow these simple secret guidelines. Ladies and gentlemen… Moore’s law…blah, blah, blah. Show generic Moore’s law slide. New challenges. Scary. … Continue reading

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Will you green-light my chip?

I already took a cursory look at the fact that the semiconductor industry is going to restructure, partially driven by the current economic downturn but mainly by the fact that almost all semiconductor companies are going to become completely fabless. … Continue reading

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For sale, a fab, cost $40/second

Semiconductor technology is a mass-production technology. Enormous functionality can be delivered in a chip that costs a few dollars. But only if you want to buy a lot of them. Further, to keep Moore’s Law on track, the scale of … Continue reading

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Guest blog: Mike Smayling

Today’s guest blog is from Mike Smayling, who is the senior VP product technology at Tela Innovations. He has a background in both the semiconductor industry at Texas Instruments, and semiconductor equipment at Applied Materials. In a couple of earlier … Continue reading

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