A unique phenomenon has started manifesting itself under the slew of mergers and acquisitions this year in the semiconductor landscape. This phenomenon is bound to intensify in the near future and would positions itself as a key factor for the future of the semiconductor industry. The winners and losers in the game would be determined… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
The “Era of the Photon” is here!
The 50 year anniversary of the publication of Moore’s Law was recently celebrated, highlighting the tremendous advances in the Microelectronics Eraof the period in human history known as the Information Age. However, the technical and economic challenges currently faced by the microelectronics industry are bringing into… Read More
MediaTek X20 Benchmark Leaks: A Prelude to 2016 Mobile Chipset Wars?
MediaTek is making waves, again. The company’s flagship mobile system-on-chip (SoC)—Helio X20—is up against rivals like Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung, according to leaked Geekbench scores, and is leading in some of the performance benchmarks.… Read More
How Not To Be Incoherent
The advantage of working with cache memory is the great boost in performance you can get from working with a local high-speed copy of chunks of data from main memory. The downside is that you are messing with a copy; if another processor happens to be working in a similar area, there is a danger you can get out of sync when reading and writing… Read More
Lighting Up The Cloud
In our rush to imagine a world populated with IoT devices, tech advances at the top end of this ecosystem (the cloud) don’t seem to get much airtime. But this isn’t because they are limited to modest refinements. As one example, there is active technology development in connectivity around fiber-based communications within the… Read More
Tuning Analog IP for High Yield at SMIC
Analog IP is more difficult to design and optimize for a given process node compared to digital IP, so any automation for analog designers is always welcome. The engineers at SMIC in China have customers that design analog IP and often they need to know how to optimize it for a specific process, so I watched a presentation by Josh Yang,… Read More
2015 3D ASIP conference: Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Hills!
Last week I presented at the 3D ASIP EDA Tutorial and attended the Conference. In previous years, leading edge papers were presented from large companies pushing a solution to meet their needs. These companies had the resources and clout to achieve some astounding successes, but the lingering question was: “what other product… Read More
Connections to Internet Drives Semiconductors
We are going to see a big reversal in what connects to the internet in next five years. At the start of this century there were about 488 million internet connections; 85% of those were connected to people for web browsing, e-mails, on-line services etc. and only 15% were used for embedded systems, remote sensing and control, and M2M… Read More
A Synergistic Chip-Package-System Analysis Methodology
Looking back, 2015 was a significant year for mergers and acquisitions in the EDA industry. The Semiwiki team maintains a chronology of major transactions here.
As I was reviewing this compendium, one of the entries that stands out is the acquisition of Apache Design Solutions by Ansys, Inc. a couple of years ago.
At that time, there… Read More
Leveraging HLS/HLV Flow for ASIC Design Productivity
Imagine how semiconductor design sizes leapt higher with automation in digital design, which started from standard hardware languages like Verilog and VHDL; analog design automation is still catching up. However, it was not without a significant effort put in moving designers from entering schematics to writing RTL, which… Read More
Musk’s Orbital Compute Vision: TERAFAB and the End of the Terrestrial Data Center