The Synopsys VC Formal group have a real talent for finding industry speakers to talk on illuminating outside-the-box-topics in formal verification. Not too long ago I covered an Intel talk of this kind. A recent webinar highlighted use of formal methods used together with a cool technique I have covered elsewhere called Quick… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Alphawave Semi Visit at #60DAC
On Wednesday at #60DAC I met Sudhir Mallya, Sr. VP Corporate Marketing at Alphawave Semi to get an update about what’s been happening at their IP company and with industry trends. The tagline for their company is: Accelerating the Connected World; and they have IP for connectivity, offer chiplet solutions, and even provide… Read More
Agile Analog Visit at #60DAC
Chris Morrison, Director of Product Marketing at Agile Analog met with me on the Tuesday at DAC this year, and I asked what has changed in the last year for their analog IP business. The short answer is that the company has initially built up foundation IP for Analog Mixed-Signal (AMS) uses, then recently added new IP for data conversion,… Read More
Upskill Your Smart Soldiers and Conquer the Chip War in Style!
My recent article, ‘Chip War without Soldiers’ explained the importance of upskilling and preparing the chip design workforce in this current scenario, and it also explained how it will lead to ‘Fabs without Chips’ if we don’t prioritize it. VLSI Engineers are the pillars of the semiconductor industry, and they can only transform… Read More
Back to Basics – Designing Out PPA Risk
I wrote earlier about managing service-level risk in SoC design, since the minimum service level a system can guarantee under realistic traffic is critical to OEM guarantees of dependable system performance. An ABS design which might get bogged down in traffic under only 0.1% of scenarios is of no use to anyone. That said, meeting… Read More
Mirabilis Invites System Architects at DAC 2023 in San Francisco
System architects have a difficult task of choosing the most efficient architecture by exploring alternative approaches, while tracking and testing requirements. Using a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach is recommended to achieve these goals, before getting mired in low-level implementation details like… Read More
CEO Interview: Ashraf Takla of Mixel
Ashraf Takla is Founder and CEO of Mixel Inc., which he founded in 1998 and is headquartered in San Jose, CA. Mixel is a leading provider of mixed-signal IPs and offers a wide portfolio of high-performance mixed-signal connectivity IP solutions. Mixel’s mixed-signal portfolio includes PHYs and SerDes, such as MIPI D-PHY, MIPI… Read More
Vision Transformers Challenge Accelerator Architectures
For what seems like a long time in the fast-moving world of AI, CNNs and their relatives have driven AI engine architectures at the edge. While the nature of neural net algorithms has evolved significantly, they are all assumed to be efficiently handled on a heterogenous platform processing through the layers of a DNN: an NPU for … Read More
Computational Imaging Craves System-Level Design and Simulation Tools to Leverage AI in Embedded Vision
Aberration-free optics are bulky and expensive. Thanks to high-performance AI-enabled processors and GPUs with abundant processing capabilities, image quality nowadays relies more on high computing power tied to miniaturized optics and sensors. Computational imaging is the new trend in imaging and relies on the fusion … Read More
A preview of Weebit Nano at DAC – with commentary from ChatGPT
Weebit Nano, a provider of advanced non-volatile memory (NVM) IP, will be exhibiting at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) this month. As part of this briefing I shared some of the basic the details with ChatGPT to see how it would phrase things. Here is some of what it suggested: “You won’t want to miss out on the epic experience… Read More


TSMC CoWoS versus Intel EMIB Semiconductor Packaging