Now that the dust has settled with the Softbank acquisition I must say that Arm is truly a different company. There are now a lot of new faces from outside the semiconductor industry, which is a good thing, and a lot less stress from Wall Street which is an even better thing. Simon can now wear whatever he wants without the worry of lowering… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Open source RISC-V ISA brings a new wrinkle to the processor market
By now most people are quite comfortable with the idea of using an open source operating system for many computing tasks. It speaks volumes that Unix, and Linux in particular, is used in the vast majority of engineering, financial, data base, machine learning, data center, telecommunications and many other applications. It was… Read More
Timing Analysis for Embedded FPGA’s
The initial project planning for an SoC design project faces a difficult engineering decision with regards to the “margin” that should be included as part of timing closure. For cell-based blocks, the delay calculation algorithms within the static timing analysis (STA) flow utilize various assumptions to replace… Read More
DSP-Based Neural Nets
You may be under the impression that anything to do with neural nets necessarily runs on a GPU. After all, NVIDIA dominates a lot of what we hear in this area, and rightly so. In neural net training, their solutions are well established. However, GPUs tend to consume a lot of power and are not necessarily optimal in inference performance… Read More
Arm TechCon Preview with the Foundries!
This week Dr. Eric Esteve, Dr. Bernard Murphy, and I will be blogging live from Arm TechCon. It really looks like it will be a great conference so you should see some interesting blogs in the coming days. One of the topics I am interested in this year is foundation IP and I will tell you why.
During the fabless transformation of the semiconductor… Read More
The Interface IP Market has Grown to $530 Million!
According with IPnest, the Interface IP market, including USB, PCI Express, (LP)DDRn, HDMI, MIPI and Ethernet IP segments, has reached $532 million in 2016, growing from $472 million in 2015. This is an impressive 13% Year-over-Year growth rate, and 12% CAGR since 2012!
Who integrate functions to interface a chip with others … Read More
How standard-cell based eFPGA IP can offer maximum safety, flexibility and TTM?
Writing a white paper is never tedious, and when the product or the technology is emerging, it can become fascinating. Like for this white paper I have written for Menta “How Standard Cell Based eFPGA IP are Offering Maximum Flexibility to New System-on-Chip Generation”. eFPGA technology is not really emerging, but it’s fascinating… Read More
How standard-cell based eFPGA IP can offer maximum safety, flexibility and TTM?
Writing a white paper is never tedious, and when the product or the technology is emerging, it can become fascinating. Like for this white paper I have written for Menta “How Standard Cell Based eFPGA IP are Offering Maximum Flexibility to New System-on-Chip Generation”. eFPGA technology is not really emerging, but it’s fascinating… Read More
ARM TechCon 2017 Preview with Mentor!
Next week is ARM TechCon which is one of my favorite conferences (SemiWiki is an event partner). This year is lucky number thirteen for ARM TechCon and it includes more than sixty hours of sessions plus more than one hundred ARM partners in the exposition. I will be signing free copies of our new book “Custom SoCs for IoT: Simplified”… Read More
Implementing IEEE 1149.1-2013 to solve IC counterfeiting, security and quality issues
As chips for any design are fabricated, it turns out that no two are the exactly the same. This is both a blessing and a curse. Current silicon fabrication technology is amazingly good at controlling factors that affect chip to chip uniformity. Nevertheless, each chip has different characteristics. The most extreme case of happens… Read More


ASML High-NA EUV is Not Ready for High-Volume Production