Late last year I wrote about Arm’s efforts to play a role in servers, in AWS, and particularly Arm-based supercomputing, in the Sandia Astra roadmap and in partnering with NVIDIA who are in the Oak Ridge Summit supercomputer. These steps came, at least for me, with an implicit “Good for them, playing a role on the edges of these challenging… Read More
Artificial Intelligence
Waking Up to the Requirements of Voice Activity Detection
There is a famous scene in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver when Robert De Niro’s character Travis is pretending to have a conversation looking in the mirror and repeatedly saying “Are you talking to me?”. I think about this scene every time I use a voice active device – Hey, are you talking to me? Yes, I am, but are you listening?
Voice command,… Read More
The Future of Chip Design with the Cadence iSpatial Flow
A few months ago, I wrote about the announcement of a new digital full flow from Cadence. In that piece, I focused on the machine learning (ML) aspects of the new tool. I had covered a discussion with Cadence’s Paul Cunningham a week before that explored ML in Cadence products, so it was timely to dive into a real-world example of the … Read More
A Compelling Application for AI in Semiconductor Manufacturing
There have been a multitude of announcements recently relative to the incorporation of machine learning (ML) methods into EDA tool algorithms, mostly in the physical implementation flows. For example, deterministic ML-based decision algorithms applied to cell placement and signal interconnect routing promise to expedite… Read More
Teaching AI to be Evil with Unethical Data
An Artificial Intelligence (AI) system is only as good as its training. For AI Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) frameworks, the training data sets are a crucial element that defines how the system will operate. Feed it skewed or biased information and it will create a flawed inference engine.
Why Go Custom in AI Accelerators, Revisited
I believe I asked this question a year or two ago and answered it for the absolute bleeding edge of datacenter performance – Google TPU and the like. Those hyperscalars (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, etc) who want to do on-the-fly recognition in pictures so they can tag friends in photos, do almost real-time machine… Read More
Seeing is Believing, the Benefits of Delta’s Low-Resolution Vision Chip
Presto Engineering recently held a webinar discussing vision chip technology – what a vision chip is, what are the applications and how can you optimize its use. Samer Ismail, a design engineer at Presto Engineering with deep domain expertise in vision chip technology was the presenter. Samer takes you on a very informative … Read More
Where’s the Value in Next-Gen Cars?
Value chains can be very robust and seemingly unbreakable – until they’re not. One we’ve taken for granted for many years is the chain for electronics systems in cars. The auto OEM, e.g. Toyota, gets electronics module from a Tier-1 supplier such as Denso. They, in turn, build their modules using chips from a semiconductor chip maker… Read More
How Blockchain Is Revolutionizing Crowdfunding
According to experts, there are five key benefits of crowdfunding platforms: efficiency, reach, easier presentation, built-in PR and marketing, and near-immediate validation of concept, which explains why crowdfunding has become an extremely useful alternative to venture capital (VC), and has also allowed non-traditional… Read More
Predicting Bugs: ML and Static Team Up. Innovation in Verification
Can we predict where bugs are most likely to be found, to better direct testing? Paul Cunningham (GM of Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on novel research ideas, again through a paper in software verification we find equally relevant to hardware. Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree.
The Innovation… Read More


The Quantum Threat: Why Industrial Control Systems Must Be Ready and How PQShield Is Leading the Defense