At DAC in 2011 I visited an EDA company called Silicon Frontline Technology because they offered some 3D field solver tools used to create the highest accuracy netlists that can then be simulated with a SPICE circuit simulator to predict timing, power and IR drop. A recent press release with X-FAB and Silicon Frontline looked interesting so I contacted Thomas Hartung, the VP Marketing and Joerg Doblaski, the team leader of the Design Technology Group at X-FAB to better understand their IC design process and why it required a 3D resistance extractor.
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LVS Challenges at Advanced Nodes

Accurate, comprehensive device recognition, connectivity extraction, netlist generation and, ultimately, circuit comparison becomes more complex with each new process generation. As the number of layers and layer ...

Preventing electrical circuit failure is a growing concern for IC designers today. Certain types of failures such as electrostatic discharge (ESD) events, have well established best practices and design rules that circuit designers should be following. Other issues have emerged more recently, such as how to check circuits for correct supply connections when there are different voltage regions on a chip in addition to other low power and electrical overstress (EOS) issues. While these topics are not unique to ...

Lunch with Jim Lai, President of Global Unichip (GUC), was the highlight of my week, I had a very nice crab cake salad. As you may have read, GUC announced itself as the “Flexible ASIC Leader” taking direct aim at the traditional ASIC market led by the likes of IBM, ST Micro, TI, Renesas, and Samsung. This will be like “shooting fish in a barrel” for two very simple reasons: 28nm/20nm ...

Being an internationally recognized industry blogger (IRIB) does have its benefits, one of which is free invites to all of the cool industry conferences! The presentations are canned for the most part but you can learn a lot at the breaks and exhibits if you know the right questions to ask, which I certainly do.

The GSA Semiconductor Ecosystem Summit is an executive conference focused on three core components of the semiconductor business model - supply chain practices, technology evolution, and financial trends. Distinguished executives from leading semiconductor companies will address critical topics including collaboration in the mobile ecosystem, supply chain practices for sustainable partnerships, smart technology development, hardware/software ...

Apple will purchase close to eight BILLION dollars in parts from Samsung for the iSeries of products this year alone, making Apple Samsung’s largest customer. Samsung is also Apple’s largest competitor and TSMC’s most viable competitive foundry threat so it was no surprise to see Apple and TSMC team up on the next generations of iProducts. The legal battle between Samsung and Apple ...