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“All models are wrong, some are useful.” This remark is attributed to the statistician George Box who used it as the section heading in a paper published in 1976.
Just for fun I looked up a few semiconductor statistics from 1976. Total capital spending was $238M in Japan and $306M in US and…that’s it, there was nobody else back then … Read More
In principle, one way to address variation is to do simulations at lots of PVT corners. In practice, most of this simulation is wasted since it adds no new information, and even so, important corners will get missed. This is what Sifuei Ku of Microsemi calls the British Museum Algorithm. You walk everywhere. And if you don’t walk to… Read More
eSilicon have a new website. Companies update their websites regularly, so why is this news? Well, eSilicon increasingly does their business on the web. They are not like Facebook, say, where their business is entirely web-based, there is a physical business behind them. So they are more like Lyft for chips. Obviously Lyft requires… Read More
If you think of Xilinx the word that immediately comes to mind is FPGA. After all they were one of the pioneers of the space. FPGAs are a means of implementing hardware, and the main implementation methodology is RTL-based. This compares to writing software and compiling it for a microprocessor, which is the main software implementation… Read More
If you didn’t watch the Apple event from the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium this morning, you didn’t miss a whole lot. The only truly different thing announced was the new remote control for the new Apple TV. Everything else was pretty much what you might expect (bigger screen, faster). The whole show seemed remarkably… Read More
One of the surprises at DAC for ICScape was to be listed on Gary Smith’s list of companies to see. Surprised, since ICScape had never presented their products to him. They were listed under design debug. They don’t have a single product that really falls under that description, but rather a family of tools under the ICExplorer… Read More
What is going on in the watch world? And I don’t mean Game of Thrones‘ nights watch.
Lots, actually. Whether it will amount to a lot remains to be seen. I still think the usefulness versus the price isn’t there yet. Apple has sold 3.5M iWatches (or something close) which for anyone else would count as a runaway success… Read More
SEMATECH has been around for over 20 years, starting in Austin. Today it is in upstate New York which increasingly seems to be the area for semiconductor research with IBM (still doing research although they sold their semiconductor business to GlobalFoundries), GlobalFoundries’ own Fab 8, the College of Nanoscale Science… Read More
Business models are really important. Just ask any internet startup company that has lots of eyeballs and is trying to work out how to monetize them. It is a lot easier to get people to use something for free, much harder to get people to pay for something especially when they don’t value it much. Different companies that look… Read More
Let’s just take it as a given that securing IP design data is critical. It’s rather like saying that it’s a good idea to have security in the Tower of London to stop the crown jewels being stolen. IP blocks are the crown jewels of an SoC company.
Data now must be secured within the collaborative teams that share that… Read More
Huawei’s and SMIC’s Requirement for 5nm Production: Improving Multipatterning Productivity