FROM
THE EDITOR
Welcome to the inaugural issue of IC Design and Verification Journal. We are excited to welcome you, the designers of today’s most complex semiconductors, into our family of engineer-focused publications. If you’re new to our JOURNAL publications, thanks for joining us. If you’re already in tune with our ways as a reader of Embedded Technology Journal or FPGA Journal, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve expanded again – with more articles, more webcasts, more news, more editors and more of the insight, analysis, humor, and humility that you’ve come to expect from our industry-leading offerings.
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Kevin Morris – Editor in Chief
Techfocus Media, Inc.
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Endangered Elite
The Forgotten Foundation of Electronics
The African Elephant is fading fast, its four tons of formidable flesh no match for the incessant greed of illegal ivory poachers. Despite enormous popularity, the Giant Panda continues to fight a losing battle for survival in the wake of the erstwhile elimination of its natural habitat. The one-hour photo booth is already little more than a memory, crushed by the convenience and cost advantages of digital photography. And, assaulted by the massive challenges of deep submicron design, the venerable IC designer is disappearing from view, only to be found in a few special preserves and refuges such as the Design Automation Conference.
Custom IC design has always been the extreme sport of electronic engineering. The design teams that could successfully put together a complex ASIC system-on-chip (SoC) design on the smallest available process geometry tend to be made up of the best and the brightest – the elite talent of the engineering crowd. IC designers have always blazed new trails, making the rules rather than following them, and constantly cutting their technological teeth on the sharpest edge of advancing technology.
During the forty-plus years that we’ve watched Mr. Moore’s self-perpetuating prognostication run its unbelievable course, an odd pattern has emerged in the population of IC-savvy engineers. In the beginning, our numbers were small – only the fantastic Fairchild few and a handful of other in-the-know visionaries carried the seeds of the nascent IC industry. Over the years, as the adoption of integrated circuits exploded, so did the number of qualified designers. [more]
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Spreading the Span
ChipX Rolls Hybrid ASIC
ChipX has long spanned the gap between FPGA and ASIC. Their range of products includes everything from structured ASIC through standard cell, and they’re often called into service when FPGAs can’t cut the mustard because of cost, power, or performance, but a full-blown minimum-geometry ASIC project is beyond the means of the project.
Now, they’re rolling out something they call “Hybrid ASICs” to make their span even more continuous. Before we get into specifics, let’s have a brief review of terminology. FPGAs are standard semiconductor products. FPGA companies build and inventory devices, and all of your customization is done after the device is completed. One step up the custom ladder from there are the (almost) defunct gate arrays. These devices are pre-built with a sea of unconnected gates, and they are customized by adding only the last few layers of metal that define the interconnect between the gates.
[more]
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