A comprehensive report from the US Department of Energy (DOE), “Semiconductor Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment” (February 2022) calls for a 1000X energy efficiency improvement that is required to maintain future compute requirement needs given a finite amount of world energy production. Energy efficiency is at the top of … Read More
Samtec Dominates DesignCon (Again)
Many technical shows have anchor tenants. Those are the companies that can be counted on to have a substantial booth presence, be active in the technical program and just pump life into the event at every turn. Samtec is that company for many shows around the world. And soon it will be time for them to work their magic at DesignCon in … Read More
ATSC 3.0: Sleeper Hit of CES 2023
Ten years ago the Open Mobile Video Coalition was touting its plans to deliver free over-the-air television to mobile devices and automobiles. At the time, OMVC was seen as the realization of a dream of delivering video to cars – front seat and back.
The dream didn’t last long and the plans for ATSC M/H brought to the market by the OMVC… Read More
ZoneCast Blast Misses Its Mark
On my flight to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics show I dug in to Jeff Smulyan’s autobiographical “Never Ride a RollerCoaster Upside Down – The Ups and Downs and Reinvention of an Entrepreneur.” As CEO, Chairman, and Founder of Emmis Communications Smulyan has had a front row seat to the evolution of the electronics… Read More
IEDM 2022 – Imec 4 Track Cell
At the IEDM conference in December 2022, Imec presented “Semi-damascene Integration of a 2-layer MOL VHV Scaling Booster to Enable 4-track Standard Cells,” I had a chance to not only read the paper and see it presented, but also to interview one of the authors Zsolt Tokie.
Logic designs are built up by standard cells such as inverters,… Read More
Who will Win in the Chiplet War?
The first Chiplet specific conference is coming up which is a milestone in itself. As we know the only thing new about chiplets is the name but when there is a dedicated conference to such a specific thing you know it has officially “arrived”. There is even a cool new tagline: Chiplets make huge chips happen!
“The First Annual Chiplet… Read More
CES is Back, but is the Market?
CES 2023, the annual consumer technology show, was held last week in Las Vegas, Nevada. Over 115,000 people attended and over 3200 companies exhibited. As shown below, attendance and exhibitors were up about 2 ½ times the pandemic limited CES 2022. However, attendance was down one-third and exhibitors were down 27% from CES 2020.… Read More
CES 2023 and all things cycling
It’s January so time for me to review what I’ve found at CES this year that relates to cycling. Unlike last year when there were many last-minute cancellations from exhibitors, in 2023 it’s in-person and bigger than ever. The electrification of bikes continues, and many of these electronic devices are cloud… Read More
2022 Phil Kaufman Award Ceremony and Banquet Honoring Dr. Giovanni De Micheli
One of the first events on the 2023 EDA calendar is the Phil Kaufman Award ceremony and banquet honoring the 2022 recipient Dr. Giovanni De Micheli. The event, hosted by the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESD Alliance) and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA), will be held Thursday, February 23, starting… Read More
IEDM 2022 – TSMC 3nm
TSMC presented two papers on 3nm at the 2022 IEDM; “Critical Process features Enabling Aggressive Contacted Gate Pitch Scaling for 3nm CMOS Technology and Beyond” and “A 3nm CMOS FinFlexTM Platform Technology with Enhanced Power Efficiency and Performance for Mobile SOC and High Performance Computing Applications”.
When … Read More


Semidynamics Unveils 3nm AI Inference Silicon and Full-Stack Systems