On Thursday April 5th the Design and Reuse SoC IP days continues in Santa Clara at the Hyatt Regency (my favorite hangout). SemiWiki is a co-sponsor and I am Chairman of the IP Security Track. More than 400 people have registered thus far and I expect a big turnout, if you look at the program you will see why. You should also know that registration… Read More
Artificial Intelligence
Uber’s Epic Fail Changes Everything
This morning at Nvidia’s AI and Deep Learning Conference, GTC 2018, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will give a keynote in which he will tout the company’s extraordinary progress in fostering and advancing the cause of artificial intelligence and deep learning along with the correlated autonomous driving industry. Hundreds… Read More
FPGA, Data and CASPA: Spring into AI (2 of 2)
Adding color to the talks, Dr. Jeff Welser, VP and IBM Almaden Research Lab Director showed how AI and recent computing resources could be harnessed to contain data explosion. Unstructured data growth by 2020 would be in the order of 50 Zetta-bytes (with 21 zeros). One example, the Summit supercomputer developed by IBM for use at… Read More
FPGA, Data and CASPA: Spring into AI
Just like good ideas percolate longer, we have seen AI adoption pace picking-up speed, propelled by faster GPUs. Some recent data points provide good indication that FPGA making a comeback to bridge chip-design needs to keep-up with AI’s ML applications.
According to the Deloitte research firm there is a projected increase of… Read More
Don’t believe the hype about AI in business
To borrow a punch line from Duke professor Dan Ariely, artificial intelligence is like teenage sex: “Everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” Even though AI systems can now learn a game and beat champions within hours, they are hard … Read More
Machine Learning Neural Nets and the On-Chip Network
Machine learning (ML), and neural nets (NNs) as a subset of ML, are blossoming in all sorts of applications, not just in the cloud but now even more at the edge. We can now find them in our phones, in our cars, even in IoT applications. We have all seen applications for intelligent vision (e.g. pedestrian detection) and voice recognition… Read More
EDA and Semiconductor — Is There Growth In The Ecosystem?
The semiconductor industry has gone through several major transitions driven by different dynamics such as shift in business models (fab-centric to fab-less), product segmentation (system design house, IP developers) and end market applications (PC to cloud; and recently, to both automotive and Internet of Things — IOT’s,… Read More
Processing Power Driving Practicality of Machine Learning
Despite their recent rise to prominence, the fundamentals of AI, specifically neural networks and deep learning, were established as far back as the late 50’s and early 60’s. The first neural network, the Perceptron, had a single layer and was good certain types of recognition. However, the Perceptron was unable to learn how to… Read More
Connecting Coherence
If a CPU or CPU cluster in an SoC is the brain of an SoC, then the interconnect is the rest of the central nervous system, connecting all the other processing and IO functions to that brain. This interconnect must enable these functions to communicate with the brain, with multiple types of memory, and with each other as quickly and predictably… Read More
First Line of Defense for Cybersecurity: AI
The year 2017 wasn’t a great year for cyber-security; we saw a large number of high-profile cyber attacks; including Uber, Deloitte, Equifax and the now infamous WannaCry ransomware attack, and 2018 started with a bang too with the hackingof Winter Olympics. The frightening truth about increasingly cyber-attacks is … Read More


The Foundry Model Is Morphing — Again