The cost of an IC depends on many factors like: NRE, masks, fabrication, testing, packaging. Product engineers are tasked with testing each part and understanding what exactly is limiting the yields. Every company has a methodology for Physical Failure Analysis (PFA), and the challenge is to make this process as quick as possible,… Read More




WEBINAR: AI-Powered Automated Timing Arc Prediction for AMS IP’s
A directed approach to reduce Risk and improve Quality
Safety and reliability are critical for most applications of integrated circuits (ICs) today. Even more so when they serve markets like ADAS, autonomous driving, healthcare and aeronautics where they are paramount. Safety and reliability transcend all levels of an integrated… Read More
The Korea/Japan trade war benefits US more than US/China hurts US
Glasses and Open Architecture for Computer Vision
You know that AI can now look at an image and detect significant objects like a pedestrian or a nearby car. But had you thought about a need for corrective lenses or other vision aids? Does AI vision decay over time, like ours, so that it needs increasing help to read prescription labels and identify road signs at a distance?
In fact no.… Read More
Learn About Implementing SmartNICs, an Achronix White Paper
We have all seen the announcements to provide ever-increasing network capabilities within the data centers. Enabling these advances are improvements in connectivity including SerDes, PAM4, optical solutions, and many others. It seems 40G is old news now, and the current push is for 400G – things are changing very quickly.… Read More
Major Drone Attack Against Global Oil Production Showcases Weak Cybersecurity Thinking
Drones attacked an oil processing facility last week and shut down half of all Saudi capacity, representing about 5% of the world’s daily oil production. We have seen how a botnet of compromised home appliances can take down a sizeable chunk of the internet, control structures of electricity and other critical infrastructures… Read More
Automatic Documentation Generation for RTL Design and Verification
Ask any hardware or software engineer working on a product, and they will tell you that writing documentation is a pain. Customers have high expectations for user manuals and reference guides, usually requiring a team of technical writers to satisfy their requirements. In order to meet time-to-market deadlines, documentation… Read More
More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel
The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel. We had a really complex process! But —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx. TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology. We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More
Radio: Relevant, Unifying, Intimate, Vulnerable
It was hard to escape the notion while attending RadiodaysAsia2019 that the world is experiencing what can only be called “peak radio.” Radio has the widest audience reach of any content delivery medium anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of India, according to researchers such as Nielsen Media, Gfk, Rajar, Edison
WEBINAR: Reusing Your IPs & PDKs Successfully With Cadence® Virtuoso®
I recently wrote about a ClioSoft® study with Google on using cloud platforms for EDA design and the importance of using persistent storage when doing that. ClioSoft will again be sharing important information on design productivity in the upcoming webinar, Reusing Your IPs & PDKs Successfully With Cadence® Virtuoso®. … Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption