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
Author: Daniel Nenni
CEO Interview: Dr. Chouki Aktouf of Defacto
“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
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
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
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
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
Are TSMC and Intel Partnering in Arizona?
After months of back and forth TSMC finally announced plans to build a fab in Arizona. The announcement was not made in the press or on the most recent investor call but on LinkedIn. A sign of the times I guess but since they need to hire a bunch of semiconductor people it was more than appropriate.
“We’re delighted to catch up with you … Read More
Nvidia Arm Acquisition Talking Points
Before founding SemiWiki I competed with Arm on many different levels throughout my career and I have had various business dealings with them since. SemiWiki also published the definitive book on Arm: “Mobile Unleashed” which goes deep into the history of Arm and the top SoC companies (Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung).… Read More
Mentor User2User Virtual Event 2020!
Now that we have gone virtual, life has never been easier, for me anyway. There are literally events every day beamed into my living room. The question is which should I attend? The answer is I should attend the ones with the most customer-based content, which is what User2User is all about. I will miss attending this one live as it was… Read More
ASIC and FPGA Design and Verification Trends 2020
Harry Foster and I started in semiconductors at the same time so it was great to reminisce while talking about the latest Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Trend reports. Before I get into the reports lets talk about Harry who is a verification superstar:
Harry is Chief Scientist Verification for the Design Verification… Read More








CES 2026 and all things Cycling