NanoIC has announced a major expansion of its process design kit portfolio with the introduction of its first A14 logic and embedded eDRAM memory PDK. This milestone reflects the company’s growing role in enabling advanced semiconductor design at cutting-edge technology nodes and addresses increasing industry demand for… Read More
Artificial Intelligence
How Switzerland Built a Global Semiconductor Edge by Thinking Smaller
By Alain-Serge Porret, Vice President, Integrated & Wireless Systems, CSEM
Since ramping up several years ago, the global semiconductor and artificial intelligence (AI) race has been driven by scale, from building larger data centers, developing bigger and more powerful models, and with them, increasingly complex and… Read More
The 71st International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM 2025)
It is hard to believe this conference is older than most all of the participants, including myself. The amount of history behind this conference is amazing. Back in 1955 the meeting began as the Electron Devices Meeting (EDM), organized by what later became the IEEE Electron Devices Society. Its core purpose was to bring together… Read More
Podcast EP329: How Marvell is Addressing the Power Problem for Advanced Data Centers with Mark Kuemerle
Daniel is joined by Mark Kuemerle, Vice President of Technology, Custom Cloud Solutions at Marvell. Mark is responsible for defining leading-edge ASIC offerings and architects system-level solutions. Before joining Marvell, Mark was a Fellow in Integrated Systems Architecture at GLOBALFOUNDRIES and has held multiple engineering… Read More
2025 Retrospective. Innovation in Verification
As usual in January we start with a look back at the papers we reviewed last year. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
Looking back at 2025
… Read MoreSynopsys’ Secure Storage Solution for OTP IP
For decades, One-Time Programmable (OTP) memory has been viewed as a foundational element of hardware security. Because OTP can be written only once and cannot be modified afterward, it has traditionally been trusted to store cryptographic keys, secure boot code, device identity, and configuration data. Permanence was often… Read More
Hierarchical Device Planning as an Enabler of System Technology Co-Optimization
AI, hyperscale data centers, and data-intensive workloads are driving unprecedented demands for performance, bandwidth, and energy efficiency. As the economic returns of traditional transistor scaling diminish, advanced IC packaging and heterogeneous integration have become the primary levers for system-level scaling.… Read More
Agentic at the Edge in Automotive and Industry
It might seem from popular debate around AI and agentic that everything in this field is purely digital, initiated through text or voice prompts, often cloud-based or on-prem. But that view misses so much. AI is already an everyday experience at the edge, for voice-based control, in object detection and safety-triggered braking… Read More
Podcast EP328:A Brief History of Chip Design and AI with Dr. Bernard Murphy
Daniel is joined by Dr. Bernard Murphy, a friend and fellow blogger on SemiWiki.
Dan explores some key milestones in Bernard’s journey in semiconductors and EDA, beginning with a focus on nuclear physics. Bernard explains how he developed an interest in AI technology and applications. In this broad and informative discussion,… Read More
Arteris Smart NoC Automation: Accelerating AI-Ready SoC Design in the Era of Chiplets
As semiconductor design pushes into increasingly complex territory, driven by Ai, ML, HPC, and heterogeneous system architectures, designers are challenged to balance performance, power, and time-to-market pressures. In this landscape, network-on-chip (NoC) architectures have emerged as a foundational building block… Read More


The Foundry Model Is Morphing — Again