The time is 1995 and my mandate as Layout Manager is to grow my team. I advertised everywhere but there were no experienced people in Canada that I can hire so the solution was back to training. I was the trainer a few times in Israel in MSIL but there we had a very organised material for layout, UNIX, software, etc. We had exercises, tests,… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
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
Students Should Attend DAC in SFO
On LinkedIn I have some 2,116 connections and many of those are students looking to enter the field of EDA, IP or semiconductor design. What a wonderful opportunity these students have by attending the 55th annual DAC in San Francisco this summer from June 24-28. Technical sessions, keynote speeches, exhibitors, networking, … Read More
ClioSoft and SemiWiki Winning
There is a bit of nostalgia here since ClioSoft was one of the first companies that we (SemiWiki) worked with 7 years ago. Back then it was hard for an emerging EDA company to get noticed by the mainstream media much less collaborate with them. Since then we have published 80 blogs with ClioSoft that have garnered more than 350,000 views.… Read More
SPIE Advanced Lithography 2018 – EUV Status
This year the Advanced Lithography Conference felt very different to me than the last couple of years. I think it was Chris Mack who proclaimed it the year of Stochastics. EUV has dominated the conference for the last several years but in the past the conversation has been mostly centered on the systems, system power and uptime.
I … Read More
Analog-to-Digital Converter IP for IoT Designs
The projected revenue growth rate for IoT electronics remains strong, across a wide range of applications – e.g., visual object identification, voice recognition, machine automation, health and fitness applications, environmental and energy controls. A key component of these designs is the analog-to-digital conversion… Read More
Robust Reliability Verification – A Critical Addition To Baseline Checks
Design process retargeting is acommon recurrence based on scaling orBOM(Bill-Of-Material) cost improvement needs. This occursnot only with the availability of foundry process refresh to a more advanced node,but also to any new derivative process node tailored towards matching design complexity, power profile or reliability… Read More
Concluding Inconclusives
Formal methods are a vital complement to other tools in the verification arsenal, but they’re not without challenges. One of the more daunting is the “inconclusive” result – that case where the tool seems to be telling you that it simply gave up trying to figure out if a particular assertion is true or false. Compounding the problem,… Read More
PCB Design in the Cloud
I remember meeting John Durbetaki at Intel where we both worked in 1980, it was an exciting time and something called the Personal Computer had just been introduced by companies like Commodore, Apple and Radio Shack (yes, Radio Shack). IBM was rather late to the party with their PC in 1981, however when IBM entered the market then … Read More
CEO Interview: Rene Donkers of Fractal Technologies
We (SemiWiki) have been working with Fractal for close to five years now publishing 25 blogs that have garnered more than 100,000 views. Generally speaking QA people are seen as the unsung heroes of EDA since the only time you really hear about them is when something goes wrong and a tapeout is delayed or a chip is respun.
FinFETs really… Read More


The Name Changes but the Vision Remains the Same – ESD Alliance Through the Years