The ISO 26262 standard defines four Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASILs), from A to D, technically measures of risk rather than safety mechanisms, of which ASIL-D is the highest. ASIL-D represents a failure potentially causing severe or fatal injury in a reasonably common situation over which the driver has little control.… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Semiconductor IP Reality Check
A robust, proven library of IP is a critical enabler for the entire semiconductor ecosystem. Without it, ASIC design is pretty much impossible, given time-to-market pressures. Said another way, designing IP for your next chip simply doesn’t fit the schedule – most teams have barely enough time to integrate and validate pre-existing… Read More
Integrated Power Management IP to Decrease Power and Cost
This blog is the synthesis of a white paper “New Power Management IP Solution from Dolphin Integration can dramatically increase SoC Energy Efficiency”, which can be found on Dolphin Integration web site.
The power consumption generated by complex chips was not a real issue when the system could be simply plugged in the wall to … Read More
DesignWare IP as AI Building Blocks
AI is disruptive and transformative to many status quos. Its manifestation can be increasingly seen in many business transactions and various aspects of our lives. While machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have acted as its catalysts on the software side, GPU and now ML/DL accelerators are spawning across the hardware… Read More
The Rebirth of Dolphin Integration!
You may have seen this Press Release (see below) announcing that Dolphin Integration (Dolphin) has been acquired by Soitec (60%) and MBDA (40%) – you can see more information about these two companies at the bottom of this blog. Founded in 1985, Dolphin had some recurrent cash flow issues during the last couple of years, that they… Read More
USB 3.x IP Revenue Have Grown by 31% in 2017 (IPnest)
Despite the strong consolidation in the semiconductor industry, the Design IP market is going well, very well with YoY growth of 12%+ in 2017, according with the “Design IP Report” from IPnest. If we look at the Interface IP category (20% growth in 2017) and analyze the IP revenues by protocols, we can see that USB IP is amazingly healthy,… Read More
The Robots are Coming!
Moshe Sheier, VP Marketing at CEVA, recently got back from MWC Shanghai and commented that robots are clearly trending. He saw hordes of robots from dozens of companies, begging for someone to brand and offer them in any one of many possible applications: in an airport to guide you to a connecting flight, for elder care, in hospitals… Read More
ISO 26262: People, Process and Product
Kurt Shuler, VP Marketing at Arteris IP, is pretty passionate that people working in the automotive supply chain should understand not just a minimalist reading of ISO 26262 as it applies to them but rather the broader intent, particularly as it is likely to affect others higher in the supply chain. As an active ISO 26262 working … Read More
Improving Yield and Reliability with In-Chip Monitoring, there’s an IP for that
There’s an old maxim that you can only improve what you measure, so quality experts have been talking about this concept for decades and our semiconductor industry has been the recipient of such practices to such an extent that we can now buy consumer products that include chips with over 5 billion transistors in them. You’ve… Read More
Webinar: Ensuring System-level Security based on a Hardware Root of Trust
A root of trust, particularly a hardware root of trust, has become a central principle in well-architected design for security. The idea is that higher layers in the stack, from drivers and OS up to applications and the network, must trust lower layers. What does it help it to build great security into a layer if it can be undermined… Read More


Intel and TSMC Take Different Paths to High-NA EUV