On November 13, Cadence held its annual Photonics Summit. Cadence has been hosting this event for several years with the intention of advancing the photonics industry. With this event, Cadence has been a catalyst in furthering photonic product development. It’s quite remarkable that Cadence hosts such an event in a field where… Read More





IP to SoC Flow Critical for ISO 26262
In thinking about automotive electronics safety standards, such as ISO 26262, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that they are in reference to systems such as autonomous driving, which are entering the marketplace. In reality, functional safety in automotive electronics plays a significant role in many well-established automotive… Read More
IEDM 2019 – TSMC 5nm Process
IEDM is in my opinion the premiere conference for information on state-of-the-art semiconductor processes. In “My Top Three Reasons to Attend IEDM 2019” article I singled out the TSMC 5nm paper as a key reason to attend.
IEDM is one of the best organized conferences I attend and as soon as you pick up your badge you are handed a memory… Read More
Why is the Press Giving AMD a Free Pass?
The Intel versus AMD rivalry is legendary amongst us Silicon Valley AARP members and is one of the reasons why the semiconductor industry is as competitive as it is today, absolutely.
AMD’s boisterous corporate culture started with AMD’s co-founder and long time CEO Jerry Sanders. Jerry was the ultimate showman but his credo “People… Read More
The Tech Week that was December 9th 2019
In a week that finally saw some good news in the trade war between US & China, here is a summary of all the key semiconductor and technical news from around the world that you may have missed.
On Friday, US and China announced agreement on the so called phase one agreement, as a result the extra tariffs due to be imposed on S180billion… Read More
Useful Skew in Production Flows
The concept of applying useful clock skew to the design of synchronous systems is not new. To date, the application of this design technique has been somewhat limited, as the related methodologies have been rather ad hoc, to be discussed shortly. More recently, the ability to leverage useful skew has seen a major improvement,… Read More
Another Smart EDA Merger Adds RF Tools
Mergers and acquisitions are just a fact of modern business life, so the semiconductor, IP and EDA industries all can benefit, but only when the two companies have complementary products with some actual synergy. Cadence acquired OrCAD back in 1999, adding a Windows-based PCB tool to their product lineup, and here in 2019 some … Read More
Autonomous Driving Still Terra Incognita
I already posted on one automotive panel at this year’s Arm TechCon. A second I attended was a more open-ended discussion on where we’re really at in autonomous driving. Most of you probably agree we’ve passed the peak of the hype curve and are now into the long slog of trying to connect hope to reality. There are a lot of challenges, … Read More
Characteristics of an Efficient Inference Processor
The market opportunities for machine learning hardware are becoming more succinct, with the following (rather broad) categories emerging:
- Model training: models are evaluated at the “hyperscale” data center; utilizing either general purpose processors or specialized hardware, with typical numeric precision of 32-bit
The First Must-Have in 5G
If I was asked about must-have needs for 5G, I’d probably talk about massive MIMO and a lot of exotic parallel DSP processing, also perhaps need for new intelligent approaches to link adaptation and intelligent network slicing in the infrastructure. But there’s something that comes before that all that digital cleverness, in … Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment