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Off-Topic: Picas, Points, and Printing

By Paul McLellan | 17 Jan 2020

Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr Day, and Cadence will be off. Breakfast Bytes will not appear. And so today is the last day before a holiday, and so I write about something off-topic. Today, printing. In fact, it is not totally off-topic since print...

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offtopic | printing
Emerging Memory

By Paul McLellan | 16 Jan 2020

SNIA, the Storage Networking Industry Association, organized a webinar recently with industry analysts Tom Coughlin (of Coughlin Associates) and Jim Handy (of Objective Analysis). The webinar was about emerging memories, meaning MRAM (magnetic), ReRA...

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Memory | optane | MRAM | persistent memory | 3dxpoint
5G in 2020

By Paul McLellan | 15 Jan 2020

There is a famous quote, attributed to Mark Twain but more likely said by his friend Charles Dudley Warner: Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. I think that 5G in 2020 is going to be like that. You will hear lots of...

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5G | CES | ces2020
Mark Cuban on Media and AI

By Paul McLellan | 14 Jan 2020

At CES there was a session in which Mark Cuban was interviewed. As he pointed out, he used to be most famous for being an entrepreneur, and then it was because he was the owner of the Mavericks basketball team, and now it is mostly his appearances on...

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CES | ces2020 | AI
Details of TSMC's IEDM Presentation on N5

By Paul McLellan | 13 Jan 2020

At IEDM in December, one of the papers in the very last session (a sneaky trick to get us all to stay) was TSMC announcing their 5nm process. The paper actually had the cumbersome title 5nm CMOS Production Technology Platform Featuring Full-Fled...

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n5 | TSMC | 5nm | IEDM
Sunday Brunch Video for 12th January 2020

By Paul McLellan | 12 Jan 2020

https://youtu.be/y62D4tVK-_k Made at CES 2020 (camera Gerard Andrews) Last Thursday: The History of Lithography, Part 1: From Stones to Lasers Last Friday: The History of Lithography, Part 2: From Double-Patterning to EUV Monday: Proti...

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sunday brunch
The Rosetta Stone and the British Museum

By Paul McLellan | 10 Jan 2020

In the first week of January, I wrote about Lars Liebmann's Rosetta Stone of Lithography in two posts The History of Lithography, Part 1: From Stones to Lasers and The History of Lithography, Part 2: From Double-Patterning to EUV . Today, the...

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british museum | sir john soane's museum | rosetta stone | museums
What's New in Consumer Electronics? CES 2020

By Paul McLellan | 9 Jan 2020

I come to Las Vegas in the first week of January each year to attend what used to be called the Consumer Electronics Show but now is officially just its initials CES. Over 175,000 attendees are expected. The first pleasant surprise was that they had ...

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5G | automotive | CES | ces2020 | robotics | drones | AI
The 40th Anniversary of LAMBDA Magazine

By Paul McLellan | 8 Jan 2020

Forty years ago today, January 8, 1980, the first issue of LAMBDA magazine was published. The Mead & Conway revolution was getting underway. Doug Fairbairn was at Xerox PARC with Lynn Conway. He would go on to be one of the founders of VLSI ...

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vlsi technology | lambda magazine | mead and conway
Open Source in 2020

By Paul McLellan | 7 Jan 2020

I recently wrote a couple of posts about open-source EDA tools, OpenROAD: Open-Source EDA from RTL to GDSII and 2nd WOSET Workshop on Open-Source EDA . I have also written about open-source in general, as an approach to development and an ap...

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open source eda | open source
Protium and Palladium 1st=

By Paul McLellan | 6 Jan 2020

We just finished 2019, of course, so it is time for annual "Best of 2019" lists. Over at John Cooley's DeepChip there was a tie at #1...between the Protium X1 platform and the Palladium Z1 platform. I said that the winners were Protium X1 and Palladi...

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Protium | Palladium | Emulation
The History of Lithography, Part 2: From Double-Patterning to EUV

By Paul McLellan | 3 Jan 2020

This is a continuation of yesterday's post The History of Lithography, Part 1: From Stones to Lasers . I'm going to drop in a copy of Lars Liebmann's Rosetta Stone of Lithography so you have it in this post, too. If you want more of an expla...

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asml | lithography | Double Patterning | multi-patterning | EUV
The History of Lithography, Part 1: From Stones to Lasers

By Paul McLellan | 2 Jan 2020

Lithography was originally a way of printing using a flat stone. Lithos (or λίθος) is the Greek for stone. The stone would be coated with wax, then a drawing made in the wax with some sort of stylus. You had to use a ...

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lithography | 193i | RET
Sunday Brunch Video for 22nd December 2019

By Paul McLellan | 22 Dec 2019

https://youtu.be/iEuzyt_6O_A Made in my living room (camera Carey Guo) Monday: The Most Important Operating System Ever Tuesday: What's Happening in RISC-V Land? Wednesday: System in Package? How to Plan and Build It Thursday: IEDM 2019...

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sunday brunch
Off-Topic: 2019 TV Anniversaries

By Paul McLellan | 20 Dec 2019

It's the day before a holiday. Or in this case, ten days when Cadence will be shut down. As is traditional, I write about whatever I feel like, provided it has nothing to do with EDA or semiconductors. Today, some TV programs. This has been a big yea...

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off-topic
IEDM 2019: An Overview...Plus the Future of EUV

By Paul McLellan | 19 Dec 2019

IEDM, the International Electron Devices Meeting, took place last week. It was also the RISC-V Summit that week, so I missed most of Tuesday at IEDM since I went down to San Jose. My overview of the RISC-V Summit is in a post earlier in the week What...

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EUV | IEDM
System in Package? How to Plan and Build It

By Paul McLellan | 18 Dec 2019

This is a follow on to my previous two pieces about system-in-package (SiP) designs, System in Package, Why Now? Part 1 and Part 2 . I'm going to use the term SiP generically just to mean any design with more than one die in the package. The focu...

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system in package | chiplet | 3DIC | OrbitIO
What's Happening in RISC-V Land?

By Paul McLellan | 17 Dec 2019

Last week was IEDM, the International Electronic Devices Meeting. I will write about that later this week, because last week was also the RISC-V Summit, which was originally scheduled for the week before in the Santa Clara Convention Center, but got ...

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Western Digital | risc-v | NVIDIA | risc-v summit | Samsung | Qualcomm
The Most Important Operating System Ever

By Paul McLellan | 16 Dec 2019

I wrote recently about Brian Kernighan's memoir and history in Brian Kernighan's Memoirs . He was at Bell Labs during the most important period for computer science, when the Unix operating system and the C programming language were creat...

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android | unix | iOS | MacOS | linux
Known Good Die

By Paul McLellan | 13 Dec 2019

Do you know what known good die are? Do you know what wafer sort is? Final test? Wafer Sort After a wafer has been manufactured in the fab, it usually (but not always) goes through wafer sort. This uses a special tester to move across the w...

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system-in-package | kgd | 3DIC | known good die
Brian Kernighan's Memoirs

By Paul McLellan | 12 Dec 2019

If you have ever worked on placement or floorplanning, and probably some other areas of EDA, then you will have heard of "Kernighan and Lin". It's a partitioning algorithm. You might not even have realized that the Kernighan of Kernigh...

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System in Package, Why Now? Part 2

By Paul McLellan | 11 Dec 2019

This post is a continuation of last week's post Multiple Die in Packages. Why Now? That post looked at several of the drivers for system integration increasingly being done using 3D packaging technologies rather than integrating everything o...

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3DIC | more than Moore | moore's law
Cadence at CES 2020: Tensilica Everywhere

By Paul McLellan | 10 Dec 2019

Once again, Cadence will be at CES in Las Vegas. It takes place January 7 to 10, 2020, the start of a new decade. I wonder what electronic marvels we will see before 2030 rolls around. We will be in the south hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center (...

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CES | Tensilica
Xcelium Is 50% Faster on AWS's New Arm Server Chip

By Paul McLellan | 9 Dec 2019

At Re:invent, Amazon AWS announced Graviton 2, their second-generation Arm server chip. In the AWS news blog , written by Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist, he provides details. Today I would like to give you a sneak peek at the next generation of Arm-...

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annapurna labs | nitro | cloud | aws | graviton 2 | cadence cloud | neoverse | ARM
Sunday Brunch Video for 8th December 2019

By Paul McLellan | 8 Dec 2019

https://youtu.be/3gP0Z02MVps Made at Salinas River State Park (camera Carey Guo) Monday: The Photonics Summit 2019: Hybrid Lasers Tuesday: Cadence to Acquire AWR Wednesday: "If You Can Get Your Ship into Orbit, You're Halfway to An...

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sunday brunch

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