Tag Archives: chip design

At DAC 2024, Efabless celebrated a milestone of 40 commercial companies designed chips using its chipIgnite and Google-sponsored OpenMPW programme. Of these, some are ready for production volumes, the majority are at the prototype/proof of concept stage, said CEO, Michael Wishart. The platform allows start-ups and smaller companies to prototype designs and innovate without having to buy a license, he ...

The Design Automation Conference (DAC) is the long-established event (celebrating 61 years in 2024) for the design and design automation of electronic chips to systems.  It offers networking opportunities as well as training, education and exhibits for designers, researchers, tool developers and vendors. Members from  more than 1,000 organizations are represented by system designers and architects, logic and circuit designers, ...

A binaural hearing aid system-on-chip prototype has been created by a consortium that including GlobalFoundries, Cadence, Leibniz University Hannover and Hoerzentrum Oldenburg. SmartHeAP, the smart hearing aid processor, is based on Cadence’ Tensilica G6 DSP and LX7 processor intellectual property, designed on Cadence’ flow and made on GloFo’s 22FDX FD-SoI platform – 22FDX has adaptive body bias to save power, ...

Synopsys has unified the workflow through its existing reliability analysis tools for analogue, mixed-signal and custom IC designs – integrating them into its PrimeWave design environment, along with PrimeSim Continuum that announced in April. The unified workflow is to be called PrimeSim Reliability Analysism and is an umbrella for its CKK, Custom Fault, AVA, SPRES, EMIR and  MOSRA tools (see table ...

Berkshire-based Sondrel is offering design services for 5nm foundry processes, building on 7nm designs, of which it has taped out a number. “We are one of the few design companies working on Samsung and TSMC at these advanced nodes,” said CEO and founder Graham Curren, enumerating: “Firstly, because they are invariably extremely large and complex with billions of gates in a ...

Berkshire-based Sondrel has tape-out of its largest chip design for a customer – with a 500mm2 footprint, over 30 billion transistors, 40 million flip-flops, and 23 thousand pads for I/O, power and ground. Up to 200 engineers were working on it simultaneously at times, according to the company. “This initially started out as a design for 28nm technology,” said Sondrel director ...

Taiwan asic design house Faraday Technology is offering RISC-V processor IP for chips aimed at AI and IoT. “This solution encompasses system-level design services, such as RISC-V core IP integration, SoC design verification, as well as a reference design kit consisting of RTOS and peripherals drivers,” said the firm, adding that it has already enabled mass production of RISC-V based AI ...

China made $12.5bn-worth of ICs last year, reports the China SIA (Semiconductor Industry Association), of which $5bn came from IC design, $3.7bn from IC fabrication and $3.8bn from IC packaging and testing. China invested $10bn in the memory industry, because it is the largest memory market and buys 75% of the global memory. Most  Chinese IC design companies rely on parent ...

Unlikely as it may seem, but Morocco is becoming a centre for IC design. STMicroelectronics has had a chip design team in Rabat Morocco for ten years . UK-based silicon design house Sondrel has design teams in the US, France, Israel and China, and now Morocco has been added to the list. “After considering several European locations, Morocco delivered both on the quality ...

Nearly 50 years ago, the greatest analogue chip designer in the world resigned.