Design clinic

The SOI Consortium recently sponsored another very successful SOI Design Clinic. Co-located with ARM’s October TechCon3 developer conference in San Jose, this clinic followed ARM’s announcement of achieving 40% power savings by porting the ARM 1176 core to SOI (see ARM’s article in this edition of ASN). The full day of talks included:

Horacio Mendez, Executive Director of the SOI Industry Consortium, gave the opening talk.

• SOI Fundamentals by Bob Ulicki, SOI Industry Consortium,
• Designing Low Power Circuits on SOI by Olivier Thomas, CEA-Leti,
• Designing High Performance Microprocessors on SOI by Nghia Phan, IBM,
• Design Tools, Flows and Methodologies for SOI: Digital, Mixed-Signal SoC and RF by Jim McMahon, Trisha Kristof and Michael Jacobs, Cadence.

SOI circuit techniques were particularly appreciated, and the follow-up question and answer sessions were animated and engaging.

However, it was clear from some of the questions that the consortium needs to continue in its efforts to reach the general design community about the basic benefits of SOI.

Bob Ulicki gave a talk on “SOI Fundamentals” on behalf of the consortium.

The design clinics are excellent educational vehicles. As one attendee commented, «I will be telling my colleagues that they should not miss this next time it is given.»

Those who attended received a password through which they can download the presentations from the consortium website.

Watch the website for news of upcoming clinics. Or, if you would like to arrange a design clinic in your region or tailored for your company, please contact the consortium.