You may already have heard today’s big news in the semiconductor fabless ecosystem that Intel is apparently in talks to buy Altera. I embarrassed myself predicting that Samsung were in talks to buy Freescale (which, of course, they might have been but NXP won that particular race). But this time it is definite enough that … Read More
Getting a Grip on the Internet of Things
QuickLogic’s CTO Tim Saxe gave a keynote Getting a Grip on the Internet of Things at the IoT Summit last week.
He started by relating how things have changed over the last 3 years when he talks to customers.
- Three years ago it was sensor hubs in smartphones and the power budget was 3mW (so one day between re-charging, something
Altera 14nm and 10nm Update!
In preparation for this blog I Googled around to get the latest information made available by Altera to see if it matches up with what I know from discussions amongst the fabless semiconductor ecosystem companies. Unfortunately when I Googled Altera+20nm+14nm the first three entries from the Altera website were Error 404 Page… Read More
2015, the Year of the Sheep…And the 16nm FPGA
If you live in California anyway, with its large Asian population, you can’t have helped noticing that it was the Lunar New Year a couple of weeks ago, the start of the year of the sheep. A couple of days after the New Year, Xilinx announced their new families of what they now call FPGAs, 3D ICs and MPSoCs. But which the rest of us … Read More
Synflow and Cx
When hardware designers hear about a new language their heart sinks. We already have Verilog, SystemVerilog and VHDL. And if you go up a level, we have C, C++ and SystemC. Isn’t that enough? However, if you tell a software engineer about a new language they are interested, there are hundreds of programming language and hundreds… Read More
Xilinx’s 16nm UltraScale+ FPGA is Revolutionary
Well a very belated Happy New Year dear reader. I must admit, it has been a very long winter and it has caused the Miller’s to rethink this vital question. “What in the world are we doing living in NY”. So we are moving, and hopefully this is my last ‘real’ winter as we headed down south. To perhaps alleviate some of the winter blues from … Read More
Got FPGA Timing Closure Problems?
I had a meeting with Harn Hua Ng, the CEO of Plunify, a couple of weeks ago. They are an EDA company that I’d never heard of. Partially that is because they only play in the FPGA space, a country I visit less frequently than SoC land. Plus, they are based in Singapore, a country I have only been to a couple of times in my life.
Plunify… Read More
Dealing with FPGA IP in all its forms
One of the recurring themes I see here in the pages of SemiWiki and elsewhere is this pitched, bordering on religious battle between Altera and Xilinx. Just because both are FPGA technologies, the tendency is to put them in the same bucket, drawing direct comparisons between them. Some folks say there is no comparison; Xilinx has… Read More
Tabula Closes its Doors
I heard a rumor at lunchtime that Tabula was closing its doors. A friend of mine talked to a couple of employees and it is true. They have to be given 2 months notice apparently so the doors don’t actually close until March 24th. I thought they had raised $150M but Wikipedia (not always reliable of course) says $215M. They were … Read More
Altera Back to TSMC at 10nm? Xilinx Staying There
Xilinx announced their quarterly results last week. They slightly missed their number due mainly to a decline in wireless sales. Of course Xilinx parts don’t go in the smartphones since the cost and power are too high, but they are very heavily used in basestation, backhaul etc especially in China. Xilinx’s business… Read More


Comparing Advanced Packaging from TSMC, Intel Foundry, and Samsung Foundry