Building a house used to be so easy. You found some flat land. You chopped down some trees. You sawed them up and put them together. Voilà! Honey, I’m home! And if a big storm knocked it down, you built another one, perhaps a bit stronger.

OK, maybe that’s not easy; it actually sounds like a lot of work, but it was conceptually simple. Today just try building a house. You’ve got permit after permit. Are the electricals up to snuff? Did the wallboard get nailed up properly? Where does … Read More → "45nm From 30,000 ft"

“Our new RuleBuster DRC tool has successfully verified a one billion transistor 65nm design for… uh… a very large semiconductor company.”  The presenter blushes a bit, looks annoyed, and then continues with his next PowerPoint slide.  The six people in the audience all know who he’s talking about, and they’re dutifully impressed.  He’s met the letter of the law on the agreement his company signed, although he is now far from the spirit of it.

When you make your living designing and selling electronic … Read More → "Burning the Secret Sauce"

ChipX has long spanned the gap between FPGA and ASIC.  Their range of products includes everything from structured ASIC through standard cell, and they’re often called into service when FPGAs can’t cut the mustard because of cost, power, or performance, but a full-blown minimum-geometry ASIC project is beyond the means of the project. 

Now, they’re rolling out something they call “Hybrid ASICs” to make their span even more continuous.  Before we get into specifics, let’s have a brief review of terminology.  FPGAs are … Read More → "Spreading the Span"

Custom IC design has always been the extreme sport of electronic engineering.  The design teams that could successfully put together a complex ASIC system-on-chip (SoC) design on the smallest available process geometry tend to be made up of the best and the brightest – the elite talent of the engineering crowd.  IC designers have always blazed new trails, making the rules rather than following them, and constantly cutting their technological teeth on the sharpest edge of advancing technology.

During the forty-plus years that we’ve watched Mr. Moore’s self-perpetuating prognostication run its … Read More → "Endangered Elite"