SOC designers face choices when it comes to choosing how to implement algorithms in their designs. Moving them to hardware usually offers advantages of smaller area, less power and faster processing. Witness the migration of block chain hashing from CPUs to ASICs. However, these advantages can come with trade-offs. For one, … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Semiconductor Security and Sleep Loss
One of the semiconductor topics that keeps me up at night is security. We track security related topics on SemiWiki and while the results are encouraging, we still have a very long way to go. Over the last three years we have published 148 security related blogs that have garnered a little more than 400,000 views. Security touches … Read More
How Apple Became a Force in the Semiconductor Industry
From our book “Mobile Unleashed”, this is the semiconductor history of Apple computer:
Observed in hindsight after the iPhone, the distant struggles of Apple in 1997 seem strange, almost hard to fathom. Had it not been for the shrewd investment in ARM, Apple may have lacked the cash needed to survive its crisis. However,… Read More
Open-Silicon SiFive and Customizable Configurable IP Subsystems
After 8 SemiWiki years, 4,386 published blogs, and more than 25 million blog views, I can tell you that IP is the most read semiconductor topic, absolutely, and that trend continues. Another correlating trend (from IP Nest) is the semiconductor IP revenue increase in relation to the semiconductor market (minus memory) which more… Read More
Why High-End ML Hardware Goes Custom
In a hand-waving way it’s easy to answer why any hardware goes custom (ASIC): faster, lower power, more opportunity for differentiation, sometimes cost though price isn’t always a primary factor. But I wanted to do a bit better than hand-waving, especially because these ML hardware architectures can become pretty exotic, so … Read More
Mathematics are Hard – That is Why AI Needs Mathematics Hardware
The field of artificial intelligence has relied on heavy inspiration from the world of natural intelligence, such as the human mind, to build working systems that can learn and act on new information based on that learning. In natural networks, neurons do the work, deciding when to fire based on huge numbers of inputs. The relationship… Read More
DAC 2019 Will Be Even More IP Friendly!
DAC 2019 will take place in Las Vegas (June 2-6) this year before moving back to San Francisco in 2020 and for the next 5 years. Considering the various rumors about merging the conference, or even the end of DAC, this is a very good news! Not only for Design Automation, but, as we will see, for the IP industry.
In fact, if we look at the exhibitor… Read More
A Sharper Front-End to Intelligent Vision
In all the enthusiasm around machine learning (ML) and intelligent vision, we tend to forget the front-end of this process. The image captured on a CCD camera goes through some very sophisticated image processing before ML even gets to work on it. The devices/IPs that do this are called image signal processors (ISPs). You might … Read More
IDT Invests in IoT Security
As we are preparing for the “IoT Devices Can Kill and What Chip Makers Need to Do Now” webinar next week, Intrinsic-ID did a nice press release with Integrated Device Technology. IDT is one of the companies I grew up with here in Silicon Valley that pivoted its way to a $6.7B acquisition by Renesas.
IDT is focused on automotive,… Read More
SOC security is not a job for general purpose CPUs
Life is full of convenience-security tradeoffs. Sometimes these are explicit, where you get to make an active choice about how secure or insecure you want things to be. Other times we are unaware of the choices we are making, and how risky they are for the convenience provided. If you leave your bike unlocked, you can expect it to be… Read More


Quantum Computing Technologies and Challenges