When I first started working in the semiconductor industry back in 1982, I realized that there was a race going on between the complexity of the system being designed and the capabilities of the technology in the tools and systems used to design them. The technology used to design the next generation of hardware was always lagging… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Achieving Clean Design Early with Calibre-RTD
Functional and physical verification are easily the two long poles in most IC product developments. During a design implementation cycle, design teams tend to push physical verification (PV) step towards the end as it is a time consuming process and requires significant manual interventions.
PV Challenges
In the traditional… Read More
The Starting Point of Functional Safety Analysis
In the course of building my understanding of functional safety, particularly with respect to ISO 26262, I have developed a better understanding of the design methods used to mitigate safety problems and the various tools and techniques that are applied to measure the impact of those diagnostics against ASIL goals. One area in… Read More
Apple and China to kill Intellectual Property?
The recent (since 2016) news about Apple, China, FTC and other organizations positioning in respect with IP are concerning, as it seems indicating that Intellectual Property in general (Design IP and Technology IP) is at risk. Let’s consider several facts through different cases, involving ARM, Qualcomm, Imagination Technologies… Read More
The Best of IP at DAC 2018 Conference
Design IP is going well, with 12% YoY growth in 2017, even if the market is about $3.5B. But Design IP is serving a $400B semiconductor market. Can you imagine the future of the semi market if the chip makers couldn’t have access to Design IP? The same is true for EDA: it’s a niche market (CAE revenues was about $3B and IC Physical Design… Read More
Being Intelligent about AI ASICs
The progression from CPU to GPU, FPGA and then ASIC affords an increase in throughput and performance, but comes at the price of decreasing flexibility and generality. Like most new areas of endeavor in computing, artificial intelligence (AI) began with implementations based on CPU’s and software. And, as have so many other applications,… Read More
SemiWiki and SmartDV on Verification IP
Bernard Murphy and I spent time with the SmartDV folks in preparation for the Design Automation Conference later this month. Bernard is an internationally recognized verification expert so his feedback is often sought after by emerging and leading verification companies, absolutely. Verification IP is a crowded market so … Read More
Single-Chip Narrow-Band IoT
Many factors go into building a competitive solution for the IoT, but few are as important for high-volume applications as low cost – not just chip cost but total system cost. If your customers are going to deploy thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of your devices in cities, factories, logistics applications, power grids… Read More
The Dawn of a New RISC
The 8[SUP]th[/SUP] RISC-V Workshop was held in Barcelona May 7-10 with 325 attendees from 150+ companies and was the biggest RISC-V event outside of Silicon Valley, demonstrating the momentum of the RISC-V Foundation and the growth of the ecosystem in Europe.… Read More
CEO Interview: Jason Oberg of Tortuga Logic
I first met Jason Oberg, CEO and one of the co-founders of Tortuga Logic, several years ago when I was still at Atrenta. At that time Jason and Jonny Valamehr (also a co-founder and the COO) were looking for partners. The timing wasn’t right, but we’ve stayed in touch, for my part because their area of focus (security) is hot and likely… Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?