All Things Semiconductor!
Konica Minolta Talks About High-Level Synthesis using C++In the early days of chip design circa…Read More
WEBINAR: GPU-Powered SPICE - The Way Forward for Analog SimulationSeveral years ago, I was a consultant to…Read More
In the mid 1980’s, Tommy George, then President of Motorola’s Semiconductor Sector, pointed out to me that the semiconductor revenue per unit area had been a constant throughout the history of the industry including the period when germanium transistors made up a large share of semiconductor revenue. I began tracking the numbers… Read More
As the automotive industry slowly comes to terms with the implications of 5G connections in cars there are few outside the industry that understand the significance of this technology transition. It isn’t just a technology turning point. It is an emotional turning point for the industry as well.
Announcements are beginning… Read More
Tuesday July 9th was the first day the show floor was open at Semicon. The following is a summary of some announcements I attended and general observations.
AMAT Announcement
My day started with an Applied Materials (AMAT) briefing for press and analysts where they announced “the most sophisticated system they have ever released… Read More
OK, so you’re in a giant mall, you want to find a store that sells gloves and you want to know how to get there. Or you’re in a supermarket and you need some obscure item, say capers, that doesn’t really fall under any of the main headings they post over the aisles. If you’re like most of us, certainly like me, this can be a frustrating experience.… Read More
At the ES Design West event in San Francisco last week Silvaco’s CTO and EVP of Products, Babak Taheri, gave a presentation titled, “Next Generation SoC Design: From Atoms to Systems”. The time slot for the talk was only 30-minutes which is simply not enough to discuss all the technology Silvaco is providing now. I had not looked closely… Read More
Bouncing along a not too bad bottom
Given that we have followed the semiconductor industry through many down cycles, we can safely say that this one isn’t all that bad by comparison. Everyone, big & small, is still safely profitable and in relatively good shape. Though we are seeing the normal week long holiday shut downs
I’ve been following the evolution of the verification space for a very long time including several stints consulting to formal verification companies. It has always been interesting to me to see how so many diverse verification techniques emerge and been used, but without much unification of the approaches. With the emergence… Read More
The use of safety-centric logic design techniques for automotive applications is now widely appreciated, but did you know that similar methods are gaining traction in the design of enterprise-level SSD controllers? In the never-ending optimization of datacenters, a lot attention is being paid to smart storage, offloading… Read More
On Monday, July 8th Imec held a technology forum ahead of Semicon West. I saw the papers presented and interviewed three of the authors. The following is a summary of what I feel are the keys points of their research.
Arnaud Furnemont
Arnaud Furnemont’s talk was titled “From Technology Scaling to System Optimization”. Simple 2D … Read More
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
In 1973 plus or minus a year or so I was working as a supervising engineer in one of the bipolar digital product groups. My boss was a man named Jerry Secrest. He was a great boss – he taught me most of what I knew about ICs in my youth. Jerry had responsibility for a product line. That… Read More
