ChipCrunch.com

SPICE simulations are the essential tool for any circuit designer. Without an accurate SPICE simulator a company might as well forget about reasonable yields when the chip finally tapes out. Nevertheless, with the ever increasing device counts and thus netlists, chip designers have had to make a choice between acceptable accuracy and reasonable runtimes. To overcome this tradeoff, circuit designers have been using many tricks to make current designs possible. For example, instead of simulating an entire block, a particular path of interest can be pruned and then simulated. Another trick is to mix and match extracted cells with cells for which parasitic are estimated on the flight. Yet another approach is to utilize fast-spice simulators, which instead of simulating each device and solving the equations associated with it, employ device switching approximations to estimate how the circuit is going to behave. Regardless, not matter how you slice and dice it, accuracy of the simulation is compromised in each case.

But usually, where there is an interesting problem to solve, you can expect a startup to emerge trying to solve it. Case in point, Cupentino, California based Xoomsys Technology. Backed by Benchmark Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, and Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, and have just finished second round funding which netted the company a nice $8 million, Xoomsys believe they have found a reasonable solution for the circuit designer’s dilemma. As the illustration below shows, Xoomsys proposes to parallelize the simulation onto a cluster of x86 machines.

The approach is quite elegant and is implemented via what the company refers to as Scalable Performance using Enhanced Effective Decoupling, or SPEED for short. In layman’s terms, SPEED takes an existing netlist and parses it into individual and smaller netlists that can then be sent off to multiple systems that run a regular SPICE simulator on each of the netlists in parallel. The breakthrough here is the ability for Xoomsys the parse the initial netlist in such a way as to minimize the communication between the parallel machines while at the same time balancing the load across all the machines. The minimization in communication is accomplished by figuring out which parts of the netlists are mostly decoupled from each other and as such can be simulated individually. Most importantly, Xoomsys guarantees that the final output of the simulation, when all the pieces are combined back together, will be identical to that of a regular SPICE simulation that would have run on the original netlist. As such, what Xoomsys offers is more of an extension that enables a company to utilize their preferred SPICE engine more efficiently.  And while performance numbers are not listed anywhere on the site, the technology itself seems quite promising.

In general, publicity is good thing for a company – so it is nice to see XMOS Semiconductor finally emerging from stealth-mode and providing some information to the public on their company and what they claim to be a revolutionary new type of programmable semiconductor technology called Software-Defined Silicon (SDS). Now don’t get too excited, the web site is still relatively sparse on details, but a quick email to XMOS resulted in a nice presentation style response that provided more insight. Founded in 2005 and backed by Amadeus Capital Partners and Esprit Capital Partners, XMOS currently consist of a team of 25 people out of Bristol, England. The company is headed by James Foster, who has previously held a CEO position at Oxford Semiconductor and before that held various engineering positions at Lucent and Lattice Semiconductor. The CTO for the company is David May, who is well known for his invention of the Transputer and the OCCAM programming language

According to XMOS, SDS will provide designers with the advantages that are usually associated with System on a Chip (SOC) solutions while at the same time providing the flexibility that FPGAs offer. SDS is implemented as an array of XCore event driven multi-threaded processor elements which are linked via an XLink inter-core communication link, both of which can be easily programmed and configured through XC - an XMOS C-style proprietary language. The advantage of this approach is that the whole system can be specified using a high-level language and no more RTL coding is necessary. Further, the whole system can be reconfigured in about the same time that it takes to recompile the actual code. The chart below summarizes the advantages of SDS versus competing technologies:

Designing ASICs is very risky unless you have really high volumes. ASSPs are less costly, but since they are sold to many companies, differentiation becomes difficult. FPGAs have almost everything going for them - except that they are very silicon inefficient, which makes them expensive and utterly unusable for high-volume consumer products that have very low margins.  The fashion criterion displayed in the chart is utterly beyond me, but as you can see SDS is fashionable as well. On the performance front, the XCore is expected to yield a performance in the 500 MIPS range. Also, developers will be able to dynamically partition resources between control processing (MIPS), DSP processing (MSPS), and I/O processing (Mbps). The key to SDS success will be whether or not XMOS will be able to deliver a robust and intuitive programming environment; without this ability most developers will likely shy away since there is nothing more frustrating than dealing with buggy tools. More technical details of the architecture and tools are scheduled to be released in Q4 of 2007 and the launch of the first device family with the complete tools set and IP library is to follow in Q1 of 2008.

While it is important to have a great idea for a startup, it can also be of great advantage to be in the right place to obtain some of the much needed venture capital funding in order to get a new company off the ground. Thus, before setting out on the startup journey it might be a good idea to understand where the venture capital money is currently flowing. One good place to start in your research is the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). As a matter of fact the NVCA just recently released a global venture investment trends survey that it undertook with sponsorship from Deloitte & Touche LLP. The survey reveals some interesting facts; for example, U.S. venture capitalists (VCs) have currently less than five percent of their capital invested overseas. This is mostly due to the fact that generally VCs seem to prefer to be near to companies they invest in – after all wouldn't you want to make sure that the money you have invested is being put to good use? Further, the report finds that countries which receive most money from U.S. VCs are China, India, Israel, and Canada. Obviously it should be of no surprise to anyone that China and India made the list given the amount of headlines that startups from these two countries have been getting. But what is more interesting is that VCs choose to invest in what is arguably a very unstable area over in Israel, while at the same time investing in Canada because of the stable conditions. The report also discusses regional investment preferences between U.S VCs and their European and Asian counterparts, takes a brief look at preferred investment strategies, and outlines some potential concerns that VCs have with regards to investing into foreign markets. Overall it is a very quick and easy read and definitely worth a look.

Whether you are interested in startups or want to make sure you get the most out of your career, be it semiconductors or another field, it is better for you to live in a city that is teaming with energy rather than a sleepy small-town, at least according to FastCompany.  There is little doubt that living in a city that is a hub for what you might be interested in can be an advantage. Taking it a step farther, if you are deciding on a college it might be a good idea to apply the same principle, since local candidates usually have an advantage in at least landing an interview and your professors are likely to have better industry connections as well. But with millions of cities to choose from, picking one can quickly become a daunting task, especially if you are not interested in one of the regular destinations like San Francisco and the nearby Silicon Valley. Lucky for you, FastCompany just published their list of Fast Cities 2007. The criteria for the list included the creativity, innovation, and energy of a city. For a short discussion of the criteria, take a look at their article here. The actual list is broken down into many categories including some rather unusual ones such as unexpected oases and creative-class meccas. They’ve also provided a nice little map that locates the cities visually on a map. Additionally, cities that are simply slow or too-fast for their own good are also briefly mentioned. The nice thing about the list is that it is global and thus there should be something for everyone on it.