mmWave design has traditionally been a boutique technology used in satellite and defense applications. Lately that’s changing. It turns out the complex, high frequency capabilities of mmWave technology are a key enabler for the 5G wireless networks being deployed today. I discussed some of this backstory in a recent post about… Read More
Perforce Embedded DevOps Summit 2021 and the Path to Secure Collaboration on the Cloud
Perforce recently held their virtual Embedded DevOps Summit. There was a lot of great presentations across many disciplines. Of particular interest to me, and likely to the SemiWiki readership as well, was a presentation by Warren Savage entitled Secure Collaboration on a Cloud-based Chip Design Environment. I’ll provide … Read More
Features of Resistive RAM Compute-in-Memory Macros
Resistive RAM (ReRAM) technology has emerged as an attractive alternative to embedded flash memory storage at advanced nodes. Indeed, multiple foundries are offering ReRAM IP arrays at 40nm nodes, and below.
ReRAM has very attractive characteristics, with one significant limitation:
- nonvolatile
- long retention time
- extremely
Webinar: Achronix and Vorago Deliver Innovation to Address Rad-Hard and Trusted SoC Design
Radiation hardening is admittedly not a challenge every SoC design team faces. Methods to address this challenge typically involve a new process technology, a new library or both. Trusted, secure design is something more design teams worry about and that number is growing as our interconnected world creates new and significant… Read More
TSMC ISSCC 2021 Keynote Discussion
Now that semiconductor conferences are virtual there are better speakers since they can prerecord and we have the extra time to do a better job of coverage. Even when conferences go live again I think they will also be virtual (hybrid) so our in depth coverage will continue.
ISSCC is one of the conferences we covered live since it’s… Read More
Probing UPF Dynamic Objects
UPF was created to go beyond what HDL can do for managing on-chip power. HDLs are agnostic when it comes to dealing with supply & ground connections, power domains, level shifters, retention and other power management related elements of SoCs. UPF fills the breach allowing designers to specify in detail what parts of the design… Read More
Samtec Lets You Learn from Home with a Great Webinar Lineup
Work from home (WFH) has become a normal occurrence this past year. “Do you work from home?” “Of course, where else?” Samtec is taking the whole work from home thing up a notch with a new webinar lineup for 2021. Back by popular demand, they are launching a new series of educational webinars. Started last year, the gEEk SpEEk Webinar… Read More
CES 2021 Goes All Digital
CES, the massive consumer technology show put on by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), was held this week. Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, CES 2021 was all digital. Last year, CES 2020 had over 170,000 attendees from over 160 countries and 4,400 exhibiting companies.
CES 2020 was held January 7-10, 2020 in Las Vegas,… Read More
CES 2021 and all things Cycling Technology
It’s January so time to give you another summary of what I’ve found at CES 2021 about new cycling products that have electronic content. During the pandemic in 2020 we’ve seen a surge in sales for bicycles, e-bikes, spin bikes and trainers as people wanted a simple way of getting around town running errands, or… Read More
ISS 2021 – Scotten W. Jones – Logic Leadership in the PPAC era
I was asked to give a talk at the 2021 ISS conference and the following is a write up of the talk.
The title of the talk is “Logic Leadership in the PPAC era”.
The talk is broken up into three main sections:
- Background information explaining PPAC and Standard Cells.
- A node-by-node comparisons of companies running leading edge logic


TSMC Formally Sues Ex-SVP Over Alleged Transfer of Trade Secrets to Intel