Flash memory has become ubiquitous, so much so that it is easy to forget what life before it was like. Large scale non-volatile storage was limited spinning disks, which were bulky, power hungry and unreliable. With NAND Flash, we have become used to carrying many gigabytes around with us all the time in the form of cell phones, USB… Read More
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are working their way into a surprising number of areas. Probably the one you think of first is autonomous driving, but we are seeing a rapidly growing number of other applications as time goes on. Among these are networking, sensor fusion, manufacturing, data mining, numerical… Read More
Connecting the Divide between Design and Manufacturing is an overarching theme within the ESD Alliance as these two essential semiconductor disciples become more reliant on each other. It’s also the reason we’re hosting SMART Design, the first system-centric series showcasing advances in electronic system design to be held… Read More
There are some metaphorical similarities between reaching timing signoff and driving a car to your destination. Most of us get in the car, turn the key and push the gas pedal to make it go. While we might have a cursory understanding of what makes it go, there are actually a lot of “moving part” under the hood in each instance. For most… Read More
One of my great pleasures in the semiconductor industry is meeting the people who have brought us to where we are today, at the forefront of modern life. One of those people is Babak Taheri, now CEO of Silvaco who I spent time with yesterday. Babak started in semiconductors around the same time I did 30+ years ago. He has a PhD in EECS and… Read More
One of the reasons I founded SemiWiki nine years ago was the lack of EDA, IP and Foundry content in the media. The problem is that unless you work in the industry it is very difficult to write about it in competent technical detail. Most media outlets only know what vendors tell them which is how the semiconductor industry worked before… Read More
Lam Research (NASDAQ:LRCX) will announce its quarterly earnings on October 23, 2019, and Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT) the following month on November 14, 2019. Both companies make equipment used to manufacture semiconductor devices. While private and institutional investors often own both individual stocks, this article… Read More
For decades development work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) was done on traditional CPUs and memory configurations. Now that we are in the “hockey stick” upturn in deployment of AI and ML, the search is on for the most efficient types of processing architectures. The result is a wave of development for… Read More
The old adage that goes the one constant thing you can always count on is change, could easily be reworded for semiconductor design to say the one constant thing you can count on is variation. This is doubly true. Not only is variation, in all its forms, a constant factor in design, additionally the methods of analyzing and dealing … Read More
My first IC design back in 1978 was a DRAM and it ran on 12V, 5V and -5V, but then my second DRAM was using only a 5V supply. Today we see SOCs running under a 1V supply voltage, but there is a totally different market for power devices that are at the other end of the voltage spectrum and they handle switching ranges from 12V – 250V. … Read More
