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Cadence’s Signoff Summit will be held next week, November 21 at Cadence in San Jose.
This is the first of a series of all-day Signoff Summits from Cadence that focus on the multiple facets of design signoff. This first summit will include keynote addresses plus sessions covering the multiple solution components that comprise… Read More
One of the hottest areas for Application Specific Integrated Circuits today is Bitcoin mining. A good friend of mine has a son who is involved in a Bitcoin start-up so we have been discussing this at great length and I will share what I have learned thus far. Coincidently, my wife asked me about Bitcoin during our most recent walk down… Read More
Xilinx just announced the shipment of the first TSMC based 20 nm FPGAs, beating Altera to the punch yet again. Xilinx was also the first to ship TSMC 28nm FPGAs and will undoubtedly beat Altera to 14nm which could be the knockout punch we have all been waiting for. The Xilinx UltraScale is a new family of FPGAs that will use 20nm and 16nm… Read More
As a professional conference attendee I see a lot of keynotes, some good and some bad. I saw a great one from Kurt Shuler at the SEMICO IP Impact Conference last week. Why this conference was not standing room only I do not know. Kurt’s characterization of the semiconductor industry was well worth the price of admission. I didn’t actually… Read More
It is important to note that the System On Chip (SoC) revolution that is currently driving mobile electronics has one very important enabling technology and that is Semiconductor Intellectual Property. Where would we be without the commercial IP market segment? Computers and phones would still be on our desks for one thing, and… Read More
Kevin Ashton, a British technology pioneer, is credited for the term “The Internet of Things” to describe an ecosystem where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors. Simply stated: rather than humans creating content for the internet IoT devices create the content. To be clear, this… Read More
As I have mentioned before, Paul McLellan and I are writing a book on the history of the fabless semiconductor industry. There is a preview available HERE, it will initially be sold as an e-book on SemiWiki and put into print early next year. Working with Paul McLellan and Beth Martin on this was an amazing experience. The research,… Read More
SoC’s are now dominated by IP blocks sourced either from 3rd parties or internal design teams. This means that IP is now critical to the success of the SoC, yet it is part of the design that teams have the least control over, or visibility into. Most design teams utilize at best ad-hoc methods to manage this IP, and the few that utilize… Read More
If I had to sum up opening day at ARM TechCon 2013 in one word it would be “crowded”. More than twice as many people attended as last year with 6,500 preregistered. The opening keynote was “The New Style of IT” pimping the HP Moonshot systems, but it could have just as easily been called “Why Intel Stock is Dead Money”,… Read More
As semiconductors become more integrated into our lives reliability is becoming a critical issue. As IP consumes more of our die, IP reliability is becoming a critical issue. As we pack more transistors into a chip, reliability is becoming a critical issue. As we move from 28nm to 20nm to 16nm, reliability is becoming a critical … Read More
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