We’re putting the finishing touches on Chapter 9 of our upcoming book on ARM processors in mobile, this chapter looking at the evolution of Qualcomm. One of the things that made Qualcomm go was their innovative use of digital simulation. First, simulation proved out the Viterbi decoder (which Viterbi wasn’t convinced had a lot … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
4 Design Tips for AVB in Car Infotainment
Audio Video Bridging (AVB) is a well-established standard for in-car infotainment, and there is a significant amount of activity for specifying and developing AVB solutions in vehicles. The primary use case for AVB is interconnecting all devices in a vehicle’s infotainment system. That includes the head unit, rear-seat entertainment… Read More
Why You Really Need Chip-Package Co-analysis
There’s only one software company that I know of that covers four major disciplines: Fluids, Structures, Electronics and Systems. That company is ANSYS and when they acquired Apache Design Automation back in 2011 they filled out their products for electronics design, and more specifically in the area of integrated chip-package… Read More
Moore’s law observations and the analysis for year 2019.
As semiconductor professionals we all are familiar with Moore’s law. Respected Gordon Moore during year 1965-1975 observed and stated that, number of transistors in dense Integrated Circuit has doubled for approximately two years. In the present scenario, if we consider the complexity of Integrated Circuit and if we… Read More
GaN Technology — Contributing to Medicine in No Small Way
In past posts, the disruptive nature of gallium nitride (#GaN) semiconductor technology, especially eGaN® FETs, was discussed…now with significantly higher performance at an equivalent cost, the inevitability of GaN displacing the aging power MOSFET is becoming clearer.
This post highlights a specific end-use application… Read More
A Security Idea for EDA / Embedded Design
I’m on a mission to find novel ideas for EDA / embedded design tools. One I have been discussing on and off with a DARPA friend for at least a couple of years is how to grade the security of a hardware design or, more comprehensively, the security of an embedded system including hardware and the software running on the hardware.
This feels… Read More
Test Driving Analog/Mixed Signal Design for the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is creating urgent demand for a new generation of analog/mixed-signal (AMS) designs, some of which also contain MEMs. To efficiently create the myriad of AMS devices at the edge of the IoT requires a design environment that is affordable and easy to use, but powerful enough to create the widely diverse… Read More
Testing Ethernet with virtual co-modeling
Ethernet is suddenly a hot topic in SoC design again. The biggest news may be this: it’s not just the cloud and enterprise networks. Those are still important applications. The cloud is driving hard for more ports at 25G server and 100G switch speeds according to a recent Dell’Oro Group report. Enterprise networks are driving for… Read More
My Experience with the Ultra Thin 2015 MacBook
Before we left for our 5 week trip to Europe I decided that I would need a real laptop computer on the road. I knew it would be a near necessity for booking hotels and making train reservations. Also, I would need to write emails and maybe even pay some online bills. I already have an iPad but really wanted to be able to run all my applications… Read More
A Complete Simulation Platform for Mobile Systems
If we take an insight into the semiconductor industry, we can easily find that mobile systems are the main drivers of this industry. The Smartphone business has remained at the top since a good number of years. Although the Smartphone sales growth has started showing a sign of stagnation, it is still a main contributor with a solid… Read More


Intel: Pushing EMIB Forward: Design Methodology Insights with Synopsys Tools