Everyone is somewhat focused on the march of process nodes. Moore’s Law, although I think that with the breach between technology and cost that may be changing. Moore’s Law was about the lowest cost way to get a given number of transistors manufactured. But now the lowest cost and the highest density are diverging. … Read More
Author: Paul McLellan
Updates for Effective Collaboration
Managing any design data management system requires a policy on how often users should be submitting their changes to the central repository. If users commit frequently with less local testing then other users will more likely see errors. If commits are done less often, but with better testing, then other users are protected from… Read More
Xilinx Datacenter on a Chip
I talked recently about the Intel acquisition of Altera which seems to be all about using FPGA technology to build custom accelerators for the datacenter. Some algorithms, especially in search, vision, video and so on map much better onto a hardware fabric than being implemented in code on a regular microprocessor.
So if the heart… Read More
Gary Smith Passed Away Last Friday
I expect most of you have already heard the sad news through other channels: Gary Smith died last Friday, July 3rd, from pneumonia in Flagstaff, Arizona.
I must have first met Gary back in Dataquest days when I was at VLSI Technology. Gartner then acquired Dataquest and eventually shut down the EDA practice and laid Gary off. He then… Read More
Opportunity NoCs, But Not Without Software
It is easy to think that semiconductor IP is all about structures on the silicon. After all, there is “semiconductor” in the phrase “semiconductor IP”. But increasingly the heart is actually software. Sonics’ SGN product is a network-on-chip but to build it you need to use the software that actually… Read More
Global Foundries Completes IBM Semiconductor Acquisition
Today the deal for GlobalFoundries to acquire IBM’s semiconductor division closed, having had regulatory clearance from Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States a couple of days ago. GlobalFoundries is, of course, owned by Mubadala which is owned by the government of the Abu Dhabi, and I have heard that there… Read More
Synopsys Aquires Security IP Company Elliptic
On Monday Synopsys announced that it was acquiring Elliptic Technologies. They have one of the largest portfolios of security IP consisting of both semiconductor IP blocks and software. Increasingly, security requires a multi-layer approach involving both secure blocks on the chip and a software stack on top of that.
Elliptic’s… Read More
Why Did Intel Pay $15B For Altera?
While I was at the imec Technology Forum someone asked me “Why did Intel pay $15B for Altera?” (the actual reported number is $16.7B).
The received wisdom is that Intel decided that it needs FPGA technology to remain competitive in the datacenter. There is a belief among some people that without FPGA acceleration available for vision… Read More
Synopsy Eats Their Own Dogfood
One of the most interesting presentations that I went to was the last presentation at the Synopsys Custom Lunch (no, the lunch wasn’t custom, we all got the same, but the presentations were about custom design). Since the last presentation was by Synopsys themselves and not by a customer, it wouldn’t seem promising that it could … Read More
Imec’s An Steegen Talks Future Process Technology
I’m an An Steegen groupie. Once or twice a year I see a presentation by her and it is a great summary in a ridiculously short period of time of all the potential upcoming semiconductor technologies. Yesterday was my annual fix at the imec Technology Forum (ITF). Today I got to sit down with her at the conference center.
An is different… Read More
The Intel Common Platform Foundry Alliance