When floor planning (FP) and place & route (P&R) tools took over from custom layout tools for standard cell based designs, life became a lot better for designers of large digital chips. The beauty of the new flows was that all the internals of the standard cells and many IP blocks were hidden from view, lightening the load … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Switch Design Signoff with IC Validator
The surge of network traffic at the data centers has driven to an increase in network bandwidth, doubling every 12-15 months according to a study conducted on Google’s data centers. The primary drivers to this uptick include the proliferation of cloud computing, more distributed storage architecture, emerging applications… Read More
Mathematics are Hard – That is Why AI Needs Mathematics Hardware
The field of artificial intelligence has relied on heavy inspiration from the world of natural intelligence, such as the human mind, to build working systems that can learn and act on new information based on that learning. In natural networks, neurons do the work, deciding when to fire based on huge numbers of inputs. The relationship… Read More
Design Integrity Investment Thesis Part 2
It is important when talking about a market to first establish the need and potential growth, then determine how the market is being served. This requires examining product features and services offered. … Read More
Accelerating 5G Design Innovation Through Simulation Workshop
DesignCon is coming up, kicking off the first of many industry conferences for the year. It’s at the Santa Clara Convention Center which is the best venue in Northern California. Not only is this a semiconductor crowd, it’s also a systems crowd covering chips, boards, and systems. More than 175 companies participate with an expected… Read More
At Last, Package and Chip integration for RF Design
It seems that it has always been that there were packages and ICs, and in the design tool world “never the twain shall meet”. The tools for designing packages were completely separate from the tools used to design IC’s. This was so profoundly true that even after Cadence merged with Valid Logic back in the early 90’s, their Allegro … Read More
Applying Generative Design to Automotive Electrical Systems
Scanning headlines of technology news every day I was somewhat familiar with the phrase “Generative Design” and even browsed the Wikipedia page to find this informative flow-chart that shows the practice of generative design.
Generative design is an iterative design process that involves a program that will generate… Read More
Specialized AI Processor IP Design with HLS
Intelligence as in the term artificial intelligence (AI) involves learning or training, depending on which perspective it is viewed from –and it has many nuances. As the basis of most deep learning methods, neural network based learning algorithms have gained usage traction, when it was shown that training with deep neural network… Read More
Rapid Prototyping ARM Based Designs Webinar
While writing the definitive book on ARM history we could not have imagined a more different exit than the SoftBank acquisition, not even close. It is now very clear why SoftBank acquired ARM for $31B. It is also very clear why alternatives like RISC-V are trending on SemiWiki and will continue to do so, absolutely. No matter what … Read More
Designing a fully digitally controlled DC-DC buck converter
One of the unsung heroes of our digital world is the modest voltage converter. Batteries and wired power sources rarely match up with the supply needs for advanced ICs. Leading edge ICs have multiple voltage domains and very often, as in the case of processors, use dynamic voltage scaling to help conserve power. Looking at where … Read More


Quantum Computing Technologies and Challenges