March 16, 2011, ISQED, Santa Clara, CA– the second lunchtime talk at this year’s ISQED focused on custom physical design flows and tools. First, Richard Morse from SpringSoft described the trends and challenges in the latest generation of processes. Mobile driven consumer electronics, like cell phones, have a large amount of analog and RF circuitry…
March 16, 2011, IEDEC, Santa Clara, CA—RK Cho, professor at the Chungbuk National University, Korea described the state of IC design education in Korea. Their goal is to drive students towards design companies, not just Samsung, and grow the electronics industry. The education programs are focused on SoC design, and is supported by the national…
March 10, 2011, Tech Design Forum, Santa Clara, CA– Tom Quan from TSMC describe the increasingly challenging issues in developing analog and mixed signal circuits in their latest 28 nm process. Designs are getting harder because of the trends of the increasing effects of parasitic elements and layout dependent effects (LDE). Device variability is increasing…
March 15, 2011, ISQED, Santa Clara, CA—Fabian Pease, professor at Stanford talked about “how much longer can Moore’s law hold?” in his keynote talk. The amount of integration is not just the number of transistors and wiring that lithography and processing can put on a piece of silicon. Historically, integration has always been to reduce…
A new conference (International Electronic Design Education Conference) on the topic of eduction for the electronics industry is having it’s first event on Wed March 16 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara. The event is organized and co-located with the 12th annual ISQED event. The speakers are both from industry and the university…
February 21, 2011, ISSCC, San Francisco–The plenary session ended with a roundtable discussion entitled ” Beyond the Horizon: The Next 10X Reduction I Power- challenges and Solutions”. The panel looked at the challenges and changes needed to achieve a order of magnitude reduction in power consumption. Jan Rabaey from UC Berkeley moderated the discussion, assisted…
January 18, 2011, Common Platform Technology Forum, Santa Clara, CA—Chia Song Hwee, chief operating officer at Global Foundries stated that the semiconductor industry is evolving and more companies are becoming fabless including IDMs who are either adopting the fabless model are going fab light. One reason is that process and design complexity are increasing and…
December 9, 2010, 3-D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging conference, Burlingame, CA—Jan Vardaman, president of TechSearch International talked about the issues in getting TSVs into high volume production. Many areas are getting past the power point levels and approaching full production status. Memories, wireless, and high-speed logic ( FPGA) are all looking into 3-D…
November 4, 2010, Audio Engineering Society Convention—San Francisco—a Panel talked about the challenges of developing a broadcast audio control room in an unusual environment. The panel was titled “Broadcast Facility Design: Attention to the Details” and was moderated by John Storyk principal from Walters-Storyk Design Group. The panel members were: Bob Skye, president of Skye…
September 1. 2010, Global Technology Conference, San Jose, CA, Chekib Akrout, senior vp technology group at AMD described the changes in the industry leading to their efforts at integrating CPU and GPU’s. The industry has come to a point where the dynamics and the technology are now available to integrate two major function blocks into…