When I first came to the US, one project that we had going on at VLSI Technology was an ASIC design being done by a French company called Telic. The chip would go into something called “Minitel” which the France Telecom (actually still the PTT since post and telecomunications had not yet been separated) planned to supply… Read More
Crushed Blackberry
I wasn’t going to write about the cell phone business again for some time. After all, this is a site about semiconductor and EDA primarily. But the cell-phone business in all its facets is a huge semiconductor consumer and continues to grow fast (despite my morbid focus on those companies that do anything but).
But Research… Read More
The Scariest Graph I’ve Seen Recently
Everyone knows Moore’s Law: the number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years. We can take the process roadmap for Intel, TSMC or GF and pretty much see what the densities we will get will be when 20/22nm, 14nm and 10nm arrive. Yes the numbers are on track.
But I have always pointed out that this is not what drives… Read More
Microsoft Messes Up Mobile Even More…and Already Went Thermonuclear
Ed wrote recently about Microsoft going thermonuclear. I think that they already did. Ed wrote about Microsoft’s tablet announcement. The second announcement is a sort of follow up to my blog on what will happen to Nokia.
Two big announcements, the first one is that Microsoft is going to produce its own tablet computers (MiPads … Read More
Off topic: Matt
This has pretty much nothing to do with EDA or semiconductor. OK, absolutely nothing. Years ago a friend pointed me at a video of a guy who used to be a video game designer (wait, a semiconductor connection) who decided to take his savings and travel the world. As he put it, “I wasn’t a very good video game designer. But I … Read More
Analog Macromodels at DAC
I use social media 7 days a week and while at DAC I received a message from Herve Guegan on my LinkedIn account where he basically said, “Hey, go check out Asygn at DAC, they do analog macro models.”… Read More
What Will Happen to Nokia?
News today is that Moody’s has downgraded Nokia to junk status. They also announced that they will lay off 10,000 people (including about 1 in 4 of the people they employ in Finland, where Nokia is headquartered).
For those of you who don’t know all the inside-baseball stuff about Nokia, here is a recent little history.… Read More
Apple Will Build In America
As Apple races towards $200B in revenue, sometime in 2013 and perhaps $300B by 2015, Tim Cook knows it is in Apple’s best interests to start building a sizeable percentage of iPhones and iPADs in the US and soon. At the All Things D conference this week, Walt Mossberg asked Cook about Apple’s manufacturing presence in China and “if … Read More
Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends
Every year or so Mary Meeker (at Kleiner-Perkins) does a big presentation on internet trends. Since the internet in general and mobile in particular is a big driver for the semiconductor industry, this report is a treasure trove of useful data and interesting facts.
For example, this graph shows the adoption rate of iPods, iPhones… Read More
Why does AT&T Fear OTT?
OTT stands for “over the top”. But in the telecom sense it does not mean outrageous, it means providing a service using the data network that competes with some service that the carrier offers and uses as a revenue stream. The most obvious of these is running Skype and so not making a voice call but perhaps the biggest threat… Read More


RISC-V and AI: The Architecture Shift Is Now