In 2003, when Open-Silicon was founded there was a growing need for flexible and innovative ways of getting chip designs manufactured. Semiconductor companies, given the alternatives of COT or traditional ASIC, often were looking for more flexibility without the huge investment and risk of going COT. Let’s look at how Open-Silicon… Read More
Author: Tom Simon
A Brief History of Open-Silicon
The (not so) Easy Life of an SOC Design Integrator
How can large SOC projects effectively integrate sub blocks and IP into a stable version for release or internal development? The person responsible for integrating SOC sub blocks into a validated configuration for release has a difficult task. Usually there are many sub-blocks, each undergoing their own development. There… Read More
IP Vendor Nabs Top Talent from Semiconductor Industry
The growth of mobile and IoT have helped increase the demand for One Time Programmable Non Volatile Memory (OTP NVM) as a solution for on-chip storage. To continue to meet this demand and grow with it, industry leading Sidense has recently brought on board seasoned semiconductor executive Ken Wagner as VP of Engineering. He was … Read More
FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016
It used to be that GPU chips moved to new process nodes pretty frequently, previously as often as annually. That is up until 2011. That was the year that 28nm GPU’s were unveiled. Since then there has been a long pause. Now in the wake of the 2016 CES both Nvidia, with its previously announced Pascal, and AMD, with the just announced Polaris,… Read More
Do You Need a 3D Printer Yet?
There is no question: you will own a 3D printer – it’s only a matter of time. The situation today is like it was with the early personal computers, at first it was the hobbyists who had them and most other people wondered what they would use one for. But over time their usefulness became obvious and the difficulty of acquiring, using and… Read More
How to Overcome HW Project Release Nightmares
Is a software development release methodology a “square peg in a round hole” when it comes to hardware design? To answer this question we have to look at how exactly hardware design projects differ from their software counterparts. Intuitively we know they are fundamentally different. Let’s take a second to dig deeper to understand… Read More
Latest Crop of Energy Harvesting Chips Powers IoT Sensor Nodes
Like death and taxes, changing batteries in remote sensor nodes and wireless IoT devices is often inevitable. Huge effort has been expended on reducing power consumption for battery operated devices, but the day always comes when the battery goes dead. Taking care of this can be as simple as popping open a battery cover and swapping… Read More
Does Managing Tools as if they are IP Make Sense?
Years ago I thought that chip design companies would embrace the latest technology and be eager to adopt new tools. What I learned was that the people implementing and managing design projects were taking a lot of risks with almost every aspect of their projects. What they most wanted is to minimize risk from the design process – especially… Read More
Evolution of Non Volatile Memory for Sensitive Data
When first interested in computers while I was in junior high school in the early 70’s I remember seeing a core memory board for the first time. It was a seriously large circuit board with a myriad of wires woven across it going through the tiny metal doughnuts that stored the bit values. The computers it went into only had a total of around… Read More
Magwel’s Current Tools Take an Active Role in Power Transistor Design
It often seems that semiconductor industry coverage focuses on large digital markets like microprocessors or high frequency analog designs for RF applications. Yes, these are large markets, but power transistors like IBGT and VFETS make up a large and crucial sector. Not only do they make their way into discretes, but they are… Read More
ASML- Soft revenues & Orders – But…China 49% – Memory Improving