Jasper at DAC

Jasper at DAC
by Paul McLellan on 05-20-2014 at 6:55 pm

Wait, didn’t Cadence just acquire Jasper. Why is there a Jasper at DAC post?

So the big event is lunch on Tuesday, on Treasure Island. For out of towners that is the island in the middle of the bay bridge (actually just half of it). Food trucks, awesome views of the bay, and really cool street performers. There will be street magic,… Read More


Low Power Design

Low Power Design
by Paul McLellan on 05-16-2014 at 9:08 pm

So you want to do a low power design. Join the club. Who doesn’t? Today all designs are low power, it is the biggest constraint on what we can do on a chip. Power down; power domains, variable clock rates, mixed Vt libraries. Every trick is needed. And that is not even enough. We get to put our phones on charge each evening and there… Read More


PrEDAC Mixer

PrEDAC Mixer
by Paul McLellan on 05-15-2014 at 3:53 pm

This month’s EDAC mixer is once again at the Savvy Cellar in Mountain View (basicallly in the Caltrain station). It is on May 22nd from 6-8pm.

Get together with your fellow industry peers and insiders at the monthly EDAC Mixer, to the benefit of local charities. You don’t need to donate anything, you just show up and pay… Read More


Atmel and the Arduino Zero

Atmel and the Arduino Zero
by Paul McLellan on 05-15-2014 at 7:00 am

As I wrote about last month, this weekend is the Maker Faire in San Mateo. If you are interested in the cutting edge of what people are getting up to outside of the corporate world, this is the place to go. You will see stuff that you will not hear about for a year or two when it finally goes mainstream.

Increasingly, there is a lot of electronics… Read More


Processors For Internet of Things

Processors For Internet of Things
by Paul McLellan on 05-06-2014 at 10:58 pm

Tomorrow and Thursday this week is the Internet of Things (IoT) developers conference. It takes place at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. There are 3 keynotes and 3 CTO viewpoints:

  • Driving Heterogeneous System Architectures Everywhere – Amit Rohatgi, Imagination Technologies
  • Solving the Networking Puzzle: From IOT
Read More

Hardware/Software Debug

Hardware/Software Debug
by Paul McLellan on 05-04-2014 at 10:59 pm

One of the big challenges with modern SoCs is that they have a complex software component as well as the hardware itself being complex. Some aspects of the hardware can be debugged independently of the software and vice versa, but often it is not immediately clear whether the source of a problem is hardware, software or some interaction… Read More


Semiconductor Cost Models: Boring But Crucial

Semiconductor Cost Models: Boring But Crucial
by Paul McLellan on 05-01-2014 at 5:00 am

One of the most important and underrated tasks in a semiconductor company is creating the cost model. This is needed in order to be able to price products, and is especially acute in an ASIC or foundry business where there is no sense of a market price because the customer and not the manufacturer owns the intellectual property and … Read More


What Do You Do When You Are Not Designing?

What Do You Do When You Are Not Designing?
by Paul McLellan on 04-30-2014 at 10:07 pm

DAC is coming up in a month (OMG less than 4 weeks and we are so not ready I hear a hundred marketing people cry out). That gives you four weeks (and a couple of days) to tell Mentor what you do in your spare time that you are passionate about (spare time, I hear a hundred engineers cry out, what is that?) and you could win $300.

For DAC, Mentor… Read More


FD-SOI Not Just For France Any More, China Signs On?

FD-SOI Not Just For France Any More, China Signs On?
by Paul McLellan on 04-30-2014 at 9:07 pm

The COO of ST Microelectronics, Jean-Marc Chery announced that they have signed a new foundry agreement for FD-SOI. What he actually said doesn’t reveal who the foundry in question is:“We have just signed a strategic agreement with a top-tier foundry for 28nm FD-SOI technology. This agreement expands the ecosystem, assuresRead More


Xilinx Quarterly Results: 20nm Prototypes

Xilinx Quarterly Results: 20nm Prototypes
by Paul McLellan on 04-29-2014 at 5:07 am

Xilinx announced their quarterly results last week. Because of their financial year not being aligned with their calendar year this is actually 4th quarter of their 2014 financial year. New Year’s Eve 2015 comes early for Xilinx. The results were very good. As Moshe Gavrielov, the CEO, said on the conference call:XilinxRead More