CEO Interview: Tony Pialis of Alphawave IP

CEO Interview: Tony Pialis of Alphawave IP
by Daniel Nenni on 12-04-2020 at 10:00 am

Tony Pialis Alphawave on SemiWiki

Tony Pialis is a visionary entrepreneur focused on developing
technologies for next generation connectivity. In the last twenty 20 years, he has co-founded three semiconductor IP companies, all exclusively targeting connectivity IP. Tony is currently the CEO of Alphawave IP Inc, a leader in delivering multi-standard wireline… Read More


Webinar: 5 Reasons Why Others are Adopting Hybrid Cloud and EDA Should Too!

Webinar: 5 Reasons Why Others are Adopting Hybrid Cloud and EDA Should Too!
by Daniel Nenni on 11-27-2020 at 6:00 am

Rescale SemiWiki

With the complexity of transistors at an all time high and growing foundry rule decks, fabless companies consistently find themselves in a game of catch up. Semiconductor designs require additional compute resources to maintain speed and quality of development. But deploying new infrastructures at this current speed is a tall… Read More


EDA Tool Support for GAA Process Designs

EDA Tool Support for GAA Process Designs
by Daniel Nenni on 11-23-2020 at 6:00 am

GAA FinFET

With the announcement of early PDK availability for the 3nm GAA process node, designers are extremely interested in the characteristics of the new “gate-all-around” transistor structure and how it compares to the existing FinFET device.  The GAA transistor has been denoted as a (horizontal) nanowire or nanosheet.

I will talk… Read More


Can Samsung Foundry Really Compete with TSMC?

Can Samsung Foundry Really Compete with TSMC?
by Daniel Nenni on 11-20-2020 at 6:00 am

Samsung TSMC 3nm Battle SemiWiki

The semiconductor foundry business has been front page news of late and for good reason, it’s an exciting time in the semiconductor industry and the foundries are where it all begins. Unfortunately, most of the “exciting” news has been overblown but this topic is of great interest, to me at least. Having been intimately involved… Read More


TSMC to Build first US Fab in Arizona!

TSMC to Build first US Fab in Arizona!
by Daniel Nenni on 11-15-2020 at 10:00 am

TSMC North America SemiWiki

Well, it’s official, the TSMC Board of Directors approved an investment to establish a wholly-owned subsidiary in Arizona with a paid-in capital of $3.5 billion. As history shows the investment may be more than that but $3.5B is a great starting point. This is being discussed in the SemiWiki Forum  and I have been gathering inside… Read More


CEO Interview: Dr. Chouki Aktouf of Defacto

CEO Interview: Dr. Chouki Aktouf of Defacto
by Daniel Nenni on 11-13-2020 at 6:00 am

Defacto CEO Interview Chouki Aktouf

“For more than 18 years, we never stopped innovating at Defacto. We are aware of EDA Mantra “Innovate or Die!”. Innovation is in our DNA, and we never stopped adding new automated capabilities to the SoC design community to help facing complexity and cost challenges, which increase every year.”

Before founding Defacto… Read More


Prototyping with the Latest and Greatest Xilinx FPGAs

Prototyping with the Latest and Greatest Xilinx FPGAs
by Daniel Nenni on 11-11-2020 at 6:00 am

Prototyping with the Latest and Greatest Xilinx FPGAs

I was reading the S2C press release announcing their new FPGA prototyping platform based on the Xilinx UltraScale+ VU19P FPGA, and how the new FPGA will accelerate billion gate FPGA prototyping, and I was struck by the stunning implications of this announcement.  Not that billion gate SoC designs can now be prototyped with FPGAs,… Read More


Embedded Systems Development Flow

Embedded Systems Development Flow
by Daniel Nenni on 11-09-2020 at 6:00 am

Webinar SoC 1

Earlier this year. as part of my coverage of the virtual Design Automation Conference (DAC), I interviewed Agnisys CEO and founder Anupam Bakshi. He talked about the new products they introduced at the show and filled me in on the history of the company and his own background. Recently, Anupam presented the webinar “System Development… Read More


AMD and Intel Update with Xilinx

AMD and Intel Update with Xilinx
by Daniel Nenni on 11-06-2020 at 10:00 am

AMD Xilinx Acquisition

The AMD acquisition of Xilinx is certainly big news but as an insider looking at the media coverage I think there are a few more points to consider. While most of the coverage has been positive there will always be negatives and we can look at that as well.

Intel acquired Altera in 2015 for $16.7B at a 50% premium which was a major disruption… Read More


The Gold Standard for Electromagnetic Analysis

The Gold Standard for Electromagnetic Analysis
by Daniel Nenni on 11-04-2020 at 6:00 am

Example of a multi level board analyzed by HFSS

Ansys HFSS has been the world’s trusted gold standard for  electromagnetic analysis for many years. As chip designs get bigger and more complex many users report that they’re extremely happy with the gold standard accuracy of HFSS but wish it would run faster. Fortunately Ansys has introduced many capabilities to HFSS over the… Read More