In this article we are trying to consolidate and bring to you some excellent articles that came up online, which annunciate the resent developments in the field of semiconductor.

So here we go :

Air-gaps in Copper Interconnects for Logic

This article talks about the use of copper and latest findings in copper as interconnect. The main attraction of the article is the way it tells us the findings. Starts with the findings of Mark Bohr of Intel in 1995 and compares the RC delay for various materials as interconnect. And proceeds towards the latest findings. 

You may get answers for your questions like "How many metal layers did INTEL use in 14nm microprocessors?"

Enjoy it!

Xilinx System Generator provides a set of Simulink blocks (models) for several hardware operations that could be implemented on various Xilinx FPGAs. These blocks can be used to simulate the functionality of the hardware system using Simulink environment. The nature of most DSP applications requires floating point format for data representation. While this is easy to implement on several computer systems running high level modeling software such as Simulink, it is more challenging in the hardware world due to the complexity of the implementation of floating point arithmetic. These challenges increase with portable DSP systems where more restricting constraints are applied to the system design. For these reasons Xilinx System Generator uses fixed point format to represent all numerical values in the system. System generator provides some blocks to transform data provided from the software side of the simulation environment (in our case it is Simulink) and the hardware side (System Generator blocks).

An introduction : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XcH9SjGX8Y
How to start a design with system generator : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCmL0LvDNFg

From MATLAB and Simulink to FPGAs in Five Easy Steps : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yapF8MLWORY

1. Sequential block with blocking assignments
The statements in a sequential block are processed in the order they are specified. A statement is executed only after its preceding statement completes execution. If delay or event control is specified, it is relative to the simulation time when the previous statement in the block completed execution.


2. Sequential block with non-blocking assignments
If no regular delays are specified then the right-hand expressions of all non-blocking statements are evaluated then the assignments are performed according to intra-assignment delays. If regular delay controls are specified then the execution order of non-blocking assignments is defined by regular delay controls.


3. Parallel block with blocking assignments
In case of parallel blocks all the statements start to execute at time 0. However the 
sequence of statements is still being taken into account. That is the variables used in each succeeding statement take the values assigned to them in preceding statements.

4. Parallel block with non-blocking assignments
In this case all the statements start to execute at time 0 and the right-hand expressions of all statements are evaluated immediately provided that there are no regular delays. It means that the variables used in each succeeding statement does not take the values assigned to them in preceding statements.

So summarizing all these cases one can say that by blocking/non-blocking statements it is controlled whether the values of variables assigned to them in preceding statements are used in succeeding statements or not. And by the Sequential/Parallel blocks it is controlled whether the simulation time is relative to the time when previous statement completed it's execution or to the time when the 
block was entered.


thanks to : http://www.edaboard.com/thread103924.html

Here we will be talking about the subjects that are normally not included in the curriculum for Microelectronics and VLSI Design people, yet important for them as their job life progresses.

1. Computer Organisation and Architecture

Computer architecture is a set of disciplines that describe the functionality, organization and implementation of computer systems. Some definitions of architecture define it as describing the capabilities and programming model of a computer but not a particular implementation. Some others say computer architecture involves instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation.

One of the best tutorial available free online is : https://www.youtube.com/user/cmu18447alt/playlists


2. Operating System Course

For operating systems by P K Biswas sir
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLDC70psjvq5hIT0kfr1sirNuees0NIbG

3. Understanding of Unix Shell scripting

Tutorial : http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/

4. Perl/ Python proficiency

For most VLSI engineers, atleast for all the back end folk, pattern matching is probably the most used and important functionality of PERL.

For instance, lets say you have a huge timing report consisting of say 100k paths and you are only interested in the paths that meet timing, you can write a small perl script to extract information relevant to such paths(start point,end point, launch and capture clocks,cells delays in these paths,  etc.). Its easy to see that to do this manually is next to impossible. 

Tutorial : https://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/