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This is a guest post by Naman Gupta, a Static Timing Analysis (STA) engineer at a leading semiconductor company in India.
Lock-Up Latches are important elements for STA engineer while closing timing on their DFT Modes: particularly the hold timing closure of the Shift Mode. While shifting, the scan chains
Maskset cost is becoming one of the major expenses to the overall NRE cost of ASIC projects, particularly with advanced technology nodes. For projects targeting low volume production the maskset cost is a financial barrier to a profitable and solid business.
Taping out using MLM instead of a full maskset
Dr. Morris Chang is not my hero. He might be the most important person in the semiconductor industry in our lifetime, but he is not my hero. I have nothing against him. I’ve never met him and probably will never will. Instead, I meet my heroes usually after tape-out,
Simply defined, Latch-Up in VLSI is a functional chip failure associated with excessive current going through the chip, caused by weak circuit design. In some cases Latch-Up can be a temporary condition that can be resolved by power cycle, but unfortunately it can also cause a fatal chip failure.
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How many ASIC service providers are typically included in a shortlist when launching a project?
We’d argue that too few.
There are over 2000 ASIC service providers worldwide that provide a range of services – ASIC design, verification, validation, packaging, testing, or supply chain solutions, which combine multiple services.
Semiconductor foundries claim they release a new technology node every two years. They may be off by a year or two, but on the whole, this is quite impressive, no doubt. Come to think of it, I don’t believe many of us even change our mobile phone every two years. How
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With the increased complexity of SoC designs, high tapeout prices and shrinking time-to-market, ASIC Prototyping has become a key step in ASIC projects. FPGA development boards are being used more often to verify ASIC design, test hardware and software integration, and provide a proof of concept demonstration to potential customers
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Two years ago TSMC announced its plans to expand into IC packaging services. It is unclear how much these plans succeeded up till now, but it definitely seems that TSMC is now in an excellent position to take a big bite into the advanced IC packaging market, enter into direct competition
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Burn in Board is a printed circuit board which functions as a jig in the Burn-in process. The Burn-in Board is used as part of the ASIC reliability testing process during which components are stressed to detect failures. Burn in Boards consist of sockets to accommodate the tested ASICs and
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The following infographics shows Synopsys’s mergers and acquisitions along the years from its very beginning. Synopsys was founded in 1986 by David Gregory, Aart de Geus and has been involved with many mergers and acquisitions.
The very recent large acquisitions include:
2008
Synplicity
ChipIT
2009
ChipIdea
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