Bluetooth has been very successful for many years, but arguably trapped in a niche, at least for us consumers, as a short-range wireless alternative to a wire connection – to connect your phone to a car or speakers for example. (In fairness I should add that the 4.2 version has improved range and Bluetooth has already become quite … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Analog, Low-power Optimization at SMIC
Talking with actual IC designers is always fascinating to me, because these engineers are the unsung heroes that enable our modern day world of consumer and industrial electronics. Too often we only hear from the CEO or other C-level executives in the press about their own companies, products, services and vision. I recently had… Read More
Tool Trends Highlight an Industry Trend for AMS designs
Archaeologists often use tools found in digs as a major indicator of trends in civilizations. The same could be said for trends in design, though we don’t have to reconstruct these design trends – we tend to see them ahead of us.
The trend in this case is the growing importance of sensors in designs and there’s no better example of that… Read More
Industrial IoT (IIoT) – Beyond Silicon Valley
Industry 4.0, Smart Factory 1.0, and Internet of Manufacturing are industry initiatives aimed at accelerating the Industrial IoT. With current market forecast exceeding $40 billion and projected to approach $100 billion by 2020, IIoT has everyone’s attention. Well, almost everyone. Turning volumes of factory data into actionable… Read More
2017 Semiconductor Dead Pool
In 2015 we saw $85B in semiconductor acquisition activity and in 2016 there was more than $110B. Given 2015 and 2016 were relatively flat years for the $335B semiconductor industry and 2017 looks like more of the same we should expect consolidation to continue, absolutely.
So, let’s come up with a list of companies that may fall in… Read More
Dassault Systemes Hosts New Microsite Focused on IP Reuse Challenges
I recently wrote an article about networks-on-chip (NoC) and how Systems-On-Chip integrated circuits (SoCs) are becoming increasingly more complex and heterogeneous in nature. While researching for that article I came upon a new micro-site by Dassault Systemes that goes into great detail about the operational challenges… Read More
Who Left the Lights On?
I attended a Mentor verification seminar earlier in the year at which Russ Klein presented a fascinating story about a real customer challenge in debugging a power problem in a design around an ARM cluster. Here’s the story in Russ’ own words. If you’re allergic to marketing stories, read it anyway. You might… Read More
Solving a Murder Case with IoT Devices
I watch a lot of Netflix and there are so many detective movies and series for me to enjoy where I try and match wits with the bad guys and figure out who is guilty a few seconds before the law enforcement characters do. On TV and with our movies there is often critical evidence extracted from desktop computers, laptops, hard drives, smart… Read More
Real Time Virtualization, How Hard Can it Be?
My first exposure to running something virtual on a computer was when I decided to run the Windows OS on my MacBook Pro using software provided by Parallels. With that virtualization I was able to run the Quicken app under Windows on my MacBook Pro, along with the popular Internet Explorer web browser. The app performance on virtualized… Read More
NetSpeed Leverages Machine Learning for Automotive IC End-to-End QoS Solutions
A couple of weeks back I wrote an article about the use of machine learning and deep neural networks in self-driving cars. Now I find that machine learning is also being applied to help build advanced end-to-end QoS (quality of service) solutions for the automotive IC market. With the advent of self-driving cars comes requirements… Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification