In my office there are plenty of LED displays for me to look at throughout the day: three 24″ displays from Viewsonic, a 15″ display from Apple, an iPad, a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, a Nexus tablet, a Garmin 520 bike computer, and a temperature display. LED and OLED displays are ubiquitous in all sorts of consumer electronics,… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing Gets Boost from Mentor TSMC Collaboration
I caught up with John Ferguson of Mentor Graphics this week to learn more about a recent announcement that TSMC has extended its collaboration with Mentor in the area of Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing (FOWLP).
In March of last year Mentor and TSMC announced that they were collaborating on a design and verification flow for TSMC’s… Read More
DesignCon 2017 and Mentor Graphics
It’s hard to believe but this is DesignCon #22 and being a Silicon Valley conference I have attended my fair share of them. This year it seems like high speed communications will take the lead followed by the latest on PCB design tools, power and signal integrity, jitter and crosstalk, test and measurement tools, parallel … Read More
It’s All About the Models
The world-renowned statistician, Professor George Box, said, “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” — that quote was the theme for one of the technical talks at the recent MOS-AK Workshop, held at UC-Berkeley. … Read More
Getting Ready for Bluetooth-5 Verification
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
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


Musk’s Orbital Compute Vision: TERAFAB and the End of the Terrestrial Data Center