More than 500 designers (562) have responded to a survey made in 2015 by Synopsys. Answering to the question “What is the fastest clock speed of your design?” 56% have mentioned a clock higher than 500 MHz (and still 40% higher than 1 GHz). If you compare with the results obtained 10 years ago, the largest proportion of answers was for… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Is Tesla Making Their Own CPUs?
One of the benefits of administering a leading semiconductor design enablement portal is that I get to see the traffic patterns then try and figure out what’s behind them. For example, a Cupertino domain has been reading all of our automotive content very thoroughly. We also get hits by Google.com, Amazon.com, and dozens of other… Read More
Cadence loads up on MACs for vision with CNNs
For vision DSP IP running convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a big driver of performance is increasing the bits processed per cycle with parallel MACs. Tom Simon did a great job in recent posts of introducing CNNs at a high level, so I’ll look at what is architecturally behind Cadence’s latest announcement: the Tensilica Vision… Read More
Fast Track to a reconfigurable ASIC design
Licensing IP can be a pain, especially when the vendor’s business model has front-loaded costs to get started. Without an easy way to evaluate IP, justifying a purchase may be tough. With more mid-volume starts coming for the IoT, wearables, automotive, and other application segments, it’s a growing concern. Flex… Read More
Webinar: How to Implement an ARM Cortex-A17 Processor in 22FDX 22nm FD-SOI Technology
Who’s doesn’t like a good webinar? I certainly do as it is one of the most time efficient ways to interact with the fabless semiconductor ecosystem, absolutely. Especially when it addresses two of the top trending topics on SemiWiki and they are ARM and FD-SOI. Here is a quick summary of what you will learn:
GLOBALFOUNDRIES… Read More
Feeding the Startup Cycle
I am a technologist, an entrepreneur and most recently an angel investor. As I have announced my investments in promising young companies over the last couple years, many people have asked me why. Isn’t the stock market easier (well…), isn’t that risky (yep), what does that mean for your role at ARM (business… Read More
Top Mobile OEM Uses NetSpeed to Boost Its Next Gen Application Processor
The smartphone segment is certainly the most competitive market for chip makers today and the yearly product launch cadence puts a lot of pressure on the application processor design cycle. End-users expect to benefit from higher image definition, better sound quality, ever faster and more complex applications which push the… Read More
ARM and FD-SOI are like Peanut Butter and Jelly!
When I first heard about a foundry possibly licensing FD-SOI I would have bet it was SMIC in China. What better market for a low cost, low power, easy to manufacture alternative to FinFETs? The foundry of course was Samsung which also made complete sense since they have 28nm gate-first capacity that matches up nicely to 28nm FD-SOI.… Read More
Get ready for hypergrade in automotive
With use cases expanding, the meaning of “automotive qualified” semiconductors is changing. What we’re now hearing about now is beyond the AEC-Q100 Grade 0 upper end of 150°C, while still meeting other reliability, retention, and security requirements. What does hypergrade mean for complex digital chip… Read More
EDAC Name Changing for ESDA, but what about IP ?
The EDA Consortium (EDAC) has changed name for Electronic Systems Design Alliance (ESD Alliance). That’s a good reminder that IC are developed (thanks to Design Automation) to be integrated into a System. A wide design ecosystem support system development, including embedded software, design intellectual property (IP), … Read More


Silicon Insurance: Why eFPGA is Cheaper Than a Respin — and Why It Matters in the Intel 18A Era