2017 in Review and 2018 Forecast

2017 in Review and 2018 Forecast
by Daniel Nenni on 12-30-2017 at 7:00 am

This has been an amazing year for me both personally and professionally. Personally we are now empty nest and have our first grandchild. SemiWiki is prospering, a company that I have been involved with for ten years (Solido Design) had a very nice exit, and my time promoting semiconductor stocks to Wall Street paid off with the PHLXRead More


CES Preview with Cadence!

CES Preview with Cadence!
by Daniel Nenni on 12-18-2017 at 7:00 am

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is in its 50th year believe it or not! The first one was in New York (1967) with 250 exhibitors and 17,500 attendees. Portable radios and TVs were all the rage followed by VCRs in 1970 and camcorders and compact discs in 1981. This year there will be 3,900+ exhibits and an estimated 170,000 attendees… Read More


Webinar: ADAS and Real-Time Vision Processing

Webinar: ADAS and Real-Time Vision Processing
by Daniel Nenni on 12-13-2017 at 7:00 am

ADAS is in many ways the epicenter of directions in the driverless car (or bus or truck). Short of actually running the car hands-free through a whole trip, ADAS has now advanced beyond mere warnings to providing some level of steering and braking control (in both cases for collision avoidance), providing more adaptive cruise control,… Read More


Free IoT SOC Books at REUSE 2017

Free IoT SOC Books at REUSE 2017
by Daniel Nenni on 12-08-2017 at 7:00 am

The second annual REUSE conference is next week bringing the fabless semiconductor ecosystem together for a day of food, fun, and some very interesting presentations. It’s at the Santa Clara Convention Center this year which is nice and it is FREE! More importantly, there will be 30+ vendors in the exhibit hall which opens… Read More


Enhancing FPGA Prototype Debug

Enhancing FPGA Prototype Debug
by Daniel Nenni on 12-06-2017 at 7:00 am

FPGA prototyping is very popular in modeling hardware for early system prove-out, early embedded software development, as a cost-effective and performance-effective platform for software-driven hardware debug and for late-stage software debug, all before silicon is available. It has significant advantages in run-time… Read More


Outsourced Operations: Reduced Risk, Fast Ramp, and Managed Complexity

Outsourced Operations: Reduced Risk, Fast Ramp, and Managed Complexity
by Daniel Nenni on 11-29-2017 at 7:00 am

One of the more interesting semiconductor success stories is Apple and how they transformed from a struggling computer company to a dominant chip maker. We covered this story in quite a bit of detail in our book “Mobile Unleashed” in Chapter 7 “From Cupertino” but the short answer to how they did it is: Outsourced Operations.


Apple’s… Read More


7nm SERDES Design and Qualification Challenges!

7nm SERDES Design and Qualification Challenges!
by Daniel Nenni on 11-22-2017 at 7:00 am

Semiconductor IP is the fastest growing market inside the fabless ecosystem, it always has been and always will be, especially now that non-traditional chip companies are quickly entering the mix. Towards the end of the year I always talk to the ecosystem to see what next year has in store for us and 2018 looks to be another year of … Read More


Mentor FINALLY Acquires Solido Design

Mentor FINALLY Acquires Solido Design
by Daniel Nenni on 11-20-2017 at 5:00 pm

I say finally because it was a long time coming… almost ten years to be exact. I started doing business development work for both Solido and Berkeley Design Automation about ten years ago and have been trying to put them together ever since. The synergy was obvious, like peanut butter and jelly. In fact, this is my third time … Read More


ASIC and TSMC are the AI Chip Unsung Heroes

ASIC and TSMC are the AI Chip Unsung Heroes
by Daniel Nenni on 11-20-2017 at 7:00 am

One of the more exciting design start market segments that we track is Artificial Intelligence related ASICs. With NVIDIA making billions upon billions of dollars repurposing GPUs as AI engines in the cloud, the Application Specific Integrated Circuit business was sure to follow. Google now has its Tensor Processing Unit, Intel… Read More


Finding the Right Needle in the IP Haystack

Finding the Right Needle in the IP Haystack
by Daniel Nenni on 11-13-2017 at 7:00 am

As the percentage of pre-configured IP increases in semiconductors, so design teams are able to reduce design cycle times. But one of the challenges for design teams is the inability to quickly and easily find IP because it’s incorrectly classified, sat in a designer’s home directory, or it’s been put into the ‘repository’ by an… Read More