Graham Bell Graham is Sr. Director of Marketing at Silvaco Inc. An experienced semiconductor-design marketing strategist and avid blogger before joining Silvaco, Graham previously was VP of marketing at Uniquify, a fabless SoC product and IP company, and at Real Intent, a verification software company. In his career, he served in senior marketing roles at Nassda, which he brought to an IPO, at Extreme DA and at Synopsys. He started his career developing analog and mixed-signal circuit simulation software. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science degree in computer hardware from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. « Less
Graham Bell Graham is Sr. Director of Marketing at Silvaco Inc. An experienced semiconductor-design marketing strategist and avid blogger before joining Silvaco, Graham previously was VP of marketing at Uniquify, a fabless SoC product and IP company, and at Real Intent, a verification software company. In his … More »
“We've been working with Silvaco since we started the company 13 years ago. They've been a big part of our success. As of today, we're still using their Expert tool for the layout editor. All of our designs are done in Expert all the way down to 5 nanometer.”
– Randy Caplan, CEO, Silicon Creations
In the following video, I interview Silvaco customer Randy Caplan of Silicon Creations from the show floor at DAC 2019, in Las Vegas, about the latest trends and challenges for nanometer IC design success. He talks about using a suite of Silvaco design tools down to the latest 5 nm silicon process nodes. A full ranscript of the conversation is below, as well.
On May 13, Silvaco announced the semiconductor design IP of Samsung Foundry is now marketed, licensed and supported through Silvaco. The addition of Samsung production-proven design IP complements Silvaco's existing SIPware IP products and solutions – embedded processors, wired interfaces, bus fabrics, peripheral controllers, cores for automotive, consumer and IoT/sensor applications. The initial offering of hard design IP is for the 14nm process node and is expected to extend to advanced technology nodes at 11nm, 10nm and 8nm, as well as mature planar technologies such as 28nm.
Jaehong Park, executive vice president of Design Platform Development Team at Samsung Electronics said this about their design IP: “After identifying the requirements for different consumer, mobile, and HPC applications, we have compiled a full suite of design IPs which include wired and high-speed interfaces, analog and mixed-signal blocks and advanced security hard/soft cores. In partnership with Silvaco, we are bringing our proven IP to SoC engineers world-wide.”
Babak Taheri, CTO and EVP of Products at Silvaco talked about the importance of Samsung IP business: “Silvaco has an established track record, with multiple Tier 1 IP semiconductor companies, to unlock their assets and deliver their captive IP to the market. Silvaco has taken the next step and became a trusted partner of Samsung Foundry. With the launch of their IP we can now offer it to SoC design teams across the world. Design IP is the fastest growing part of Silvaco's business, and we expect accelerated growth with our Samsung Foundry partnership. I look forward to extending our collaboration with this premier foundry for current and future technology nodes.”
The Samsung Foundry hard and soft design IP will be offered by Silvaco starting in June 2019. If you would like to know more, go to our web-page Samsung Foundry IP.
What’s in the Silvaco SIPware Catalog
Silvaco's SIPware design IP portfolio is a mix of internal IP from acquisitions, such as SoC Solutions, and partnership with leading System companies. Silvaco has packaged and launched the captive IP from major companies such NXP, TI, Freescale and Infineon to the SoC design marketplace, with Samsung Foundry being the latest. SIPware has been repeatedly proven in production applications.
SIPware is offered in over a dozen different categories spanning both hard (GDS) and soft (RTL) IP types.
For soft IP, the categories include:
Automotive
AMBA Cores and Subsystems
Wired Interfaces
Security for Safety Applications
SIPware hard IP, with a few exceptions, is from Samsung Foundry. It covers many categories and includes:
Audio and Video
Wired and High-Speed Interface
PLL
Data Converter
Regulators and Sensors
Security for Safety Applications
Samsung Foundry Process Technology
Samsung has consistently held a leading position in the semiconductor industry, and this has now been extended to its foundry business as well. According to IC Insights, Samsung Electronics was the semiconductor market leader in 2018. The reason Samsung has kept its consistent position in the semiconductor industry is its foundry infrastructure. The main backbone of any semiconductor company is ultimately the manufacturing and fab facilities available to it. Its fabrication roadmap includes four FinFET-based processes from 7nm down to 4nm that leverage extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology as well as 3nm GAA. In the second half of this year, Samsung is scheduled to start the mass production of 6nm process devices and complete the development of 4nm process.
Samsung Foundry’s operations are truly global as well with presence across the world for supporting semiconductor manufacturing, testing, packaging, etc. Samsung is a leader the way in packaging technology development, with many innovations making their debuts in Samsung consumer products. Some of its #1 packaging technologies include:
World-largest fine pitch flip chip packaging
World-first through silicon via technology mass production for high-density DRAM
World-first TSV SiP product development for mobile application processors
World-best package-on-package technology for smart phones
World-highest capacity flash memory stacking technologies for SSD
As shown in the figure, Samsung Foundry’s offerings cover the needs of devices, ranging from IoT to consumer electronics, mobile computing, high end computing to automotive products.
Fig. 1. Applications areas of Samsung Foundry offerings.
A Closer Look at Process Nodes
Fig. 2. 14/11nm node process scaling.
14/11nm FinFET
Samsung Foundry introduced the foundry industry’s first 14nm FinFET process technology circa 2013. Samsung Foundry claims several advantages for the process such as the smallest SRAM 14nm bit cell in the industry.
Samsung’s fourth generation 14nm process technology, 14LPU, delivers higher performance at the same power and design rules compared to its Cost-effective third-generation 14nm process (14LPC). 14LPU is suited for high-performance and compute-intensive applications. The 14nm platform covers various applications from high performance (AI, network) to low power(mobile, crypto currency) with.
The Samsung 11LPP process is a hybrid process technology designed to speed up migration from one node to another. Notably, the new node is not a14LPP-based offering featuring 20 nm BEOL (back end of line) interconnects. Instead 11LPP is based on Samsung’s 10 nm BEOL and therefore enables smaller chips than technologies based on Samsung's 14 nm offerings. Meanwhile, the 11LPP still uses some of the elements featured by Samsung's 14LPP fabrication process.
Silvaco SIPware has a broad portfolio of 14/11 nm IP.
10/8nm FinFET
Fig. 3. 10/8nm node process scaling.
Samsung foundry has developed 10nm FinFET technology with an optimized fin structure, stress engineering and cost-effective multi-patterning technology to meet aggressive market requirements. The real benefit of 10nm technology is not just scaling, but also DTCO (Design Technology Co-Optimization) methodology which offer more scalability and better performance than prior nodes. Samsung foundry has evolved the utilization of multi-patterning technology to overcome cost concerns dues to additional masks and it is expected 10nm will have a life-time similar to14nm. The 8LPP node is the most optimized and economical node until EUV availability at 7nm. 8LPU provides ultra-low power with similar switching performance to 7nm.
FD-SOI (Fully Depleted-Silicon on Insulator)
Fig. 4. 28/18nm FD-SOI node process scaling.
Samsung Foundry expects to tape-out more than 20 chips in its 28-nm FD-SOI process this year, as the process now has mature yields and a growing customer set for 28-nm FDS. Application areas for the reported tapeouts include Networking/Computing, Consumer, IoT/Wearable and Automotive/Industrial. The South Korean giant provides design guides for using the body biasing of the process and has automotive Grade 1 capability in place with Grade 2 coming by mid-year. The availability of eMRAM (embedded Magnetic Random Access Memory) technology enables ultra-small bit cell area, superior write speed and endurance time.
18FDS has the same BEOL as the 14nm FinFET process employing double-patterning and is a migration path for MCU and IoT applications.
Packaging Solutions:
Samsung Foundry provides package solutions through a well-built ecosystem with memory suppliers and OSATs (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test providers) based on 30 years of integration experiences (1 billion parts of PoP are already shipped so far). Samsung Foundry provides chip/package co-design services which enables optimized design from the beginning of the project. Interposer design is also included in the Foundry’s design services for 2.5D application solutions.
Samsung Foundry already provides a leading memory integration package solution in mobile applications. As higher performance and thinner/smaller package solutions are required, next generations of PoP technology are already applied to several mobile devices and under development.
Fig. 5. Samsung Mobile Packaging Solution Flow
High-Speed and Wired-Interface IP
Now that we have an overview of the Samsung Foundry process and packaging solutions, we can look at their specific offerings for high-speed and wired-interface IP. In the table below we see 44 different IPs offered across 5 different process nodes from the SIPware catalog. The performance of the IP meets maximum bandwidth requirements: PCIe up to 16 Gbps, DDR up to 20 Gbps, MIPI M-PHY to 12 Gbps, Ethernet to 56 Gbps, USB / DisplayPort to 5 Gbps and Wi-Fi to 9.2 Gbps.
Table 1. A SIPware catalog table of Samsung Foundry Interface IP.
Table 1 is just a sample of the available IP. To learn more about Silvaco SIPware for Samsung Foundry, visit Samsung Foundry IP.
Silvaco did Executive Video Interviews at our booth in the middle of the show floor at Display Week 2019 in San Jose. We interviewed industry experts on what they expected for the Display industry in 2019 and what technical challenges that needed to be met. The interviews are displayed below. One video interview really stood out for me. Eddy Hsu, Director, Display Systems at Lumiode related how they were creating the future use Silvaco TCAD tools and had brought Lumiode to where it is today. It is the first one in the list.
On Monday, May 13, Silvaco announced that the semiconductor design IP of Samsung Foundry is now marketed, licensed and supported through Silvaco. The addition of Samsung production-proven design IP complements Silvaco’s existing SIPware IP products and solutions—embedded processors, wired interfaces, bus fabrics, peripheral controllers, cores for automotive, consumer and IoT/sensor applications. The initial offering of hard design IP is for the 14nm process node and is expected to extend to advanced technology nodes at 11nm, 10nm and 8nm, as well as mature planar technologies such as 28nm.
Jaehong Park, executive vice president of Design Platform Development Team at Samsung Electronics said this about their design IP: “After identifying the requirements for different consumer, mobile, and HPC applications, we have compiled a full suite of design IPs which include wired and high-speed interfaces, analog and mixed-signal blocks and advanced security hard/soft cores. In partnership with Silvaco, we are bringing our proven IP to SoC engineers world-wide.”
Babak Taheri, CTO and EVP of Products at Silvaco talked about the importance of Samsung IP business: “Silvaco has an established track record, with multiple Tier 1 IP semiconductor companies, to unlock their assets and deliver their captive IP to the market. Silvaco has taken the next step and became a trusted partner of Samsung Foundry. With the launch of their IP we can now offer it to SoC design teams across the world. Design IP is the fastest growing part of Silvaco’s business, and we expect accelerated growth with our Samsung Foundry partnership. I look forward to extending our collaboration with this premier foundry for current and future technology nodes.”
It was 1988 when I got into SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) while I was characterizing a 1.5 μm Standard cell library developed by students at my Alma-Mata Furtwangen University in Germany. My professor Dr. Nielinger was not only my advisor he also wrote the first SPICE bible in German language. At that time SPICE simulation was already established as the “golden” Simulator for circuit design for over a decade – and remains so to this day.
Of course, SPICE simulators went through several evolutions to adapt to the requirements of the most advanced technologies nodes, and SPICE models have been extended to be able to accurately reflect real silicon behavior; however, it seems that we are now at the point where it takes just too long to extend the models or come up with a complete new model for a specific material.
While over the first three decades only about half a dozen materials where used to manufacture semiconductors, ASM a leading semiconductor equipment manufacturer predicts that by 2020 more than 40 different materials will be in high volume production for the most advanced FinFET nodes at 7 and 5 nm.
This figure shows a 3D representation of a 10nm FinFET transistor front-end-of-line (FEOL) and back end of line up to MET1 already requires 14 different materials. A similar number of materials are required for full back end of line (BEOL) description. Read the rest of SPICE Model Generation by Machine Learning
In his webinar, Babak Taheri, CTO and EVP of products at Silvaco, provides examples of how complex new technologies such as Flash memory, other advanced non-volatile memory technologies, and complex SoCs (such as Nvidia’s Xavier and Apple’s A12), use and re-use design IP at the architectural level, but require specialized new IPs that need to be simulated and analyzed down to the nanometer and atomic levels.
The number and complexity of automotive SoCs and Control Systems is growing dramatically to fill the demand for new features in next-generation vehicles. Let's look at the specifics. In new cars you will have an advanced graphical user interface, voice recognition, and intuitive touchscreen capabilities. In addition to driver interactions, electrical control systems assist in both driving and stopping the vehicle. This will drive significant growth of the In-Vehicle Network (IVN) semiconductor market. In 2019, the total market in automotive semiconductors will reach 38 billion US dollars. By 2021, the cumulated annual growth rate (CAGR) for Level 4 Semi-autonomous vehicles will be 19%. Longer range projections are needed for Level-5 autonomous vehicles which have not arrived in the marketplace as yet. By 2030, the CAGR forecast for Level-5 vehicles is 41%. All of this is good news for the electronics industry. Which electronic companies are the top players? NXP, Infineon, Renesas, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments had 1/2 of the market for automotive semiconductors in 2015 and are still market leaders.
Dr. Misha Temkin was a beloved colleague and researcher who worked at Silvaco for over 30 years. He passed on March 12, 2019 after a long cancer illness. He was a dedicated Senior Applications Engineer in the TCAD Division at the Santa Clara, California headquarters.
Mikhail “Misha” Temkin was born August 22, 1955 in the small town Rechitsa on Dnepr River in Belarus, which was a part of the Soviet Union at that time. His parents, a mechanical engineer and a medical doctor just graduated a few months before and were sent by the government to work in an even smaller town in the middle of nowhere between Volga and Ural Mountains. According to his brother, the first 3 years of his life he grew there on not much food, but a lot of love. For the next 30 years he lived in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
As a kid he played a lot of chess and won against many older players, but in Middle school he discovered the Feynman Lectures on Physics. Physics then became his passion for the rest of his life, and he studied it at Belarussian State University. His first paper “On the momentum representation of Slater-type orbitals” was published in Journal of Physics B in 1976, before his Master’s (not many postdocs in Soviet Union of that time had a single publication in an international peer-reviewed scientific journal). Read the rest of Remembering Dr. Misha Temkin
Silvaco CEO David Dutton sits down with Graham Bell to discuss the growth of the company in 2018 including drivers and trends from customers and also takes a look forward to 2019.
Graham Bell: Hi. This is Graham Bell with Silvaco. I’m speaking with David Dutton, CEO.
David Dutton: Hi, Graham.
GB: David, there’s been a recent growth announcement from Silvaco. Can you give us some details about that?
DD: Yeah, we were really happy. I think we announced, this year was our fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth, and even more important that we had growing profitability on GAAP‑based revenue and profitability, so we’re very excited about that. And I think for people in the industry who’ve known Silvaco a long time, historically we’ve been a boutique company, and now we’ve really changed and become a growth company. And a lot of it has been around how you position and drive the culture. So, when about four or five years ago, we started to look at Silvaco with a great set of products, and we realized, “Oh, you know what, we need to focus on being a market leader.” Before, we were a technology company. But when you turn and focus on market leadership, it really forces you to think about, “What does the industry need? How do I orient my products for them?” And I think we’re starting to see the benefits of that shifting culture, where we’ve taken great products and now oriented them to really meet some of the challenges of the industry going forward.
Graham Bell sits down with Dr. Bogdan Tudor, head of Silvaco’s device characterization group, to discuss Gan High-electron-mobility transistors, and the practical modeling of real world components as presented in his webinar. You can catch the full webinar at this link: TCAD-based Model Extraction Flow for GaN HEMT Devices – Part 2.
Dr. Misha Temkin was a beloved colleague and researcher who worked at Silvaco for over 30 years. He passed on March 12, 2019 after a long cancer illness. He was a dedicated Senior Applications Engineer in the TCAD Division at the Santa Clara, California headquarters.
