In 2019 I was involved in a major project to move all our engineering and financial systems to the cloud. We succeeded in this endeavor, but it wasn’t easy. We faced a lot of infrastructure challenges during our journey. The freedom from facility management and capital budgeting offered by the cloud was significant, however. If … Read More
Artificial Intelligence
Synopsys Delivers a Brief History of AI chips and Specialty AI IP
Let’s face it, AI is everywhere. From the cloud to the edge to your pocket, there is more and more embedded intelligence fueling efficiency and features. It’s sometimes hard to discern where human interaction ends, and machine interaction begins. The technology that underlies all this is quite complex and daunting to understand.… Read More
A New ML Application, in Formal Regressions
Machine learning (ML) is a once-in-a-generation innovation that seems like it should be applicable almost everywhere. It’s certainly revolutionized automotive safety, radiology and many other domains. In our neck of the woods, SoC implementation is advancing through learning to reduce total negative slacks and better optimize… Read More
Expanding Role of Sensors Drives Sensor Fusion
It is long past the time when general purpose processors could meet the needs of sensor fusion. Sensor fusion performs operations to process and integrate raw sensor data so that downstream processing is simplified and is performed at a higher level. When done properly it offers several other significant benefits such as lower… Read More
2020 Retrospective. Innovation in Verification
Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I launched our series on Innovation in Verification at the beginning of last year. We wanted to explore basic innovations and new directions researchers are taking for hardware and system verification. Even we were surprised to find how rich a seam we had tapped. We plan… Read More
Siemens EDA is Applying Machine Learning to Back-End Wafer Processing Simulation
There’s a lot to unpack in the title of this post. First, Siemens EDA is the new name for Mentor, a Siemens Business. The organization continues to operate as part of Siemens Digital Industries Software. The organization has released a white paper that describes research done with the American University of Armenia. The work examines… Read More
CEO Interview: Arun Iyengar of Untether AI
I had a chance to catch up with Arun Iyengar, CEO of Untether AI. Untether AI recently unveiled its tsunAImi accelerator cards powered by the company’s runAI devices. Using at-memory computation, Untether AI breaks through the barriers of traditional von Neumann architectures, offering industry-leading compute density … Read More
ESL Expertise when You Need It. Spinning Up Faster
System-level expertise, once the domain a few architecture specialists, is now shouldering its way everywhere into chip design and verification. In virtual modeling together with OS and application software certainly. That now couples into mixed-level system-verification, using different levels of abstraction for different… Read More
ML plus formal for analog. Innovation in Verification
Can machine learning be combined with formal to find rare failures in analog designs? ML plus formal for analog – neat! Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on research ideas. Here an idea from analog simulation sampling. Feel free to comment.
The Innovation
This month’s pick… Read More
Low Power SRAM Register Files for IoT, AI and Wearables
SRAM is the workhorse for on-chip memories, valued for its performance and easy integration with standard processes. The needs of wearable, IoT and AI SOCs have put a lot of pressure on the requirements for all on-chip memories. This is perhaps most evident in the area of power. AI chips that rely heavily on SRAM register files are… Read More


The AI PC: A New Category Poised to Reignite the PC Market