The global market for earphones and headphones in 2020 is estimated to have been $34B and is expanding at a compound rate of over 20% per year. Of this almost 50% is said to be earphones which are shifting rapidly to True Wireless Stereo (TWS). We have seen the sales of TWS devices grow from 1M units is 2016 to 109M units in 2019, though … Read More
Artificial Intelligence
Enabling Edge AI Vision with RISC-V and a Silicon Platform
AI vision processing moving to the edge is an undeniable industry trend. OpenFive, the custom silicon business unit of SiFive, discusses this trend with compelling facts in their recent paper titled “Enabling AI Vision at the Edge.” AI vision is being deployed in many applications, such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, … Read More
Honda Asserts Automated Driving Leadership
When Honda Motor Co. tied up with General Motors almost a year ago to collaborate on vehicle propulsion technology, connected car tech, and assisted driving, observers might have been forgiven for thinking Honda was surrendering its independence to catch up in the EV race. Honda reasserted its independence last week with the
Accelerating AI-Defined Cars
Convergence of Edge Computing, Machine Vision and 5G-Connected Vehicles
Today’s societies are becoming ever more multimedia-centric, data-dependent, and automated. Autonomous systems are hitting our roads, oceans, and air space. Automation, analysis, and intelligence is moving beyond humans to “machine-specific” … Read More
Finding Large Coverage Holes. Innovation in Verification
Is it possible to find and prioritize holes in coverage through AI-based analytics on coverage data? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is Using Machine Learning Clustering To Find Large Coverage … Read More
Achronix Demystifies FPGA Technology Migration
System designers who are switching to a new FPGA platform have a lot to think about. Naturally a change like this is usually done for good reasons, but there are always considerations regarding device configurations, interfaces and the tool chain to deal with. To help users who have decided to switch to their FPGA technology, Achronix… Read More
Synopsys is Enabling the Cloud Computing Revolution
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
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


The Risk of Not Optimizing Clock Power