According with ESDA, EDA revenues have grown YoY by 16.2% in Q2 2018, and this is the good news for our industry. The bad news is the decline of SIP (Design IP) revenues, by (3.1%) at the same time. As far as I am concerned, this figure looks weird, so I will try to understand the reason why SIP category can go wrong in a healthy EDA market,… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Avionics and Embedded FPGA IP
The design of electronic systems for aerospace applications shares many of the same constraints as apply to consumer products – e.g., cost (including NRE), power dissipation, size, time-to-market. Both market segments are driven to leverage the integration benefits of process scaling. … Read More
ARM TechCon 2018 is Upon Us!
ARM TechCon is one of the most influential conferences in the semiconductor ecosystem without a doubt. This year ARM TechCon has moved from the Santa Clara Convention Center to the much larger convention center in San Jose. Last year the conference seemed to be busting at the seams so this move makes complete sense. A little less … Read More
How to Increase Energy Efficiency for IoT SoC?
If you have read the white paper recently launched by Dolphin, “New Power Management IP Solution from Dolphin Integration can dramatically increase SoC Energy Efficiency”, you should already know about the theory. This is a good basis to go further and discover some real-life examples, like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chip in … Read More
One Less Reason to Delay that Venture
Many of us dream about the wonderful widget we could build that would revolutionize our homes, parking, health, gaming, factories or whatever domain gets our creative juices surging, but how many of us take it the next step? Even when you’re ready to live on your savings, prototypes can be expensive and royalties add to the pain. … Read More
Synopsys Seeds Significant SIM Segue
It turns out that consumers are not alone in their love-hate relationship with SIM cards. SIM cards save us from increasingly widespread cellphone cloning. However, if your experience is anything like mine, it seemed that with every new phone, a new SIM card format was needed. Furthermore, people travelling overseas who wanted… Read More
Mesh Networks, Redux
It isn’t hard to understand the advantage of mesh networking (in wireless networks). Unlike star/tree configurations in which end-points connect to a nearby hub (such as phones connecting to a conventional wireless access point), in a mesh nodes can connect to nearest neighbors, which can connect to their nearest neighbors… Read More
Crossfire Baseline Checks for Clean IP at TSMC OIP
IP must be properly qualified before attempting to use them in any IC design flow. One cannot wait to catch issues further down the chip design cycle. Waiting for issues to appear during design verification poses extremely high risks, including schedule slippage. For example, connection errors in transistor bulk terminals where… Read More
Highly Modular, AI Specialized, DNA 100 IP Core Target IoT to ADAS
The Cadence Tensilica DNA100 DSP IP core is not a one-size-fits-all device. But it’s highly modular in order to support AI processing at the edge, delivering from 0.5 TMAC for on-device IoT up to 10s or 100 TMACs to support autonomous vehicle (ADAS). If you remember the first talks about IoT and Cloud, a couple of years ago, the IoT … Read More
Neural Network Efficiency with Embedded FPGA’s
The traditional metrics for evaluating IP are performance, power, and area, commonly abbreviated as PPA. Viewed independently, PPA measures can be difficult to assess. As an example, design constraints that are purely based on performance, without concern for the associated power dissipation and circuit area, are increasingly… Read More


Intel and TSMC Take Different Paths to High-NA EUV