The IC industry is commonly divided into different market segments – consumer, mobile, industrial, commercial, medical, automotive, and aerospace. A key differentiation among these segments is the characterization and reliability qualification strategy for the fabrication process and design circuitry. For each segment,… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Wanted by January 30th: Paper for DAC IP Track 2018!
DAC 2018 will take place in San Francisco in June (24 to 28) and you have a fantastic opportunity to present a paper in the IP track! In fact, the deadline has been extended to January 30[SUP]th[/SUP] to submit your proposal.
Let’s make it clear: you are not expected to send the completed paper by this date, just the following:
- The title
Webinar: Fast-track SoC Verification – Reduce time-to-first-test with Synopsys VC AutoTestbench
There seems to be a general sense that we have the foundations for block/IP verification more or less under control, thanks to UVM standardizing infrastructure for directed and constrained-random testing, along with class libraries providing building blocks to simplify verification reuse, build sequence tests, verify register… Read More
Context is Everything – especially for autonomous vehicle IP
GM has just announced that it will introduce a car with no steering wheel or pedals in 2019. According to their statement, they have already planned four phases of their autonomous driving system, and they will plan many more. However, before we jump into this latest car and not grab the wheel for a spin, it is reasonable to ask about… Read More
Simulation and Formal – Finding the Right Balance
Simulation dominates hardware functional verification today and likely will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile formal verification, once thought to be a possible challenger for the title, has instead converged on a more effective role as a complement to simulation. Formal excels at finding problems… Read More
Moving from FPGA’s to Embedded FPGA Fabric – How it’s Done
Buying IP is just a little bit more complicated than buying a pair of shoes. A lot of IP is configurable and requires attention to various design and configuration parameters. We live in an age where commercial soft IP is used pretty often in designs, so people have developed increasing comfort in the process that is required to achieve… Read More
Achieving ISO 26262 Certification with ASIL Ready IP
According with McKinsey, “analysts predict revenue growth for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to be up to 29 percent, giving the segment one of the highest growth rates in the automotive and related industries.” Design cycle in automotive segment is much longer than in segments like mobile, PC or consumer. If you expect… Read More
The lofty rise of the lowly FPGA
FPGA programmable logic has served in many capacities since it was introduced back in the early 80’s. Recently, with designers looking for innovative ways to boost system performance, FPGA’s have moved front and center. This initiative has taken on new urgency with the slowing down of process node based performance gains. The… Read More
CEVA ClearVox Simplifies Voice Pickup
Voice-based control is arguably becoming another killer app, or killer app-enabler in the very significant shifts we are seeing in automation. After a bumpy start in car feature control (for navigation, phone calls, etc) and early smartphone “intelligent” assistants, voice-based interfaces now seem to be maturing into a genuinely… Read More
Getting Started with RISC-V
As I mentioned before, SiFive and RISC-V are trending topics on SemiWiki.com which makes complete sense since we have been covering semiconductor IP and ARM since we first went online in January of 2011.
In total we have published 707 IP related blogs that earned 3,565,140 views (5043 views per blog average). Out of that, 254 are … Read More


Intel and TSMC Take Different Paths to High-NA EUV