Growing up in a military family, mostly in California, I would consider my cultural diversity life experience to be more than most. I remember in the 1960s some older folks were chattering about a colored family moving into our neighborhood and they had a son my age. Imagine my excitement as a child in having a multicolored friend!… Read More





For Car Makers Google Scare Means It’s Time to Share
Google says it wants to charge fees to handset makers in Europe for Android apps such as Googlemaps and Gmail, according to the New York Times. The move is clearly a reaction to the $5.1B fine imposed by the European Commission (and under appeal by Google) in reaction to Google’s perceived monopolist practices.
Is the scare… Read More
Ford in DC Refining Autonomous
When cities put on a press event to announce they are welcoming a company to town to test autonomous vehicles within the city limits the news is greeted with polite interest and some trepidation – as it was yesterday in Washington, D.C. There is an “oo-ah awesome” high-tech buzz immediately tempered by a “Why?” buzzkill.
In… Read More
Webinar: NVIDIA Talks High Quality Metrics in Power Integrity Signoff
There’s a familiar saying that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Taking that one step further, the more improvement you want, the more accurately you have to measure. This become pretty important when you’re building huge designs in advanced technologies. Margins are a lot tighter all round and use-cases are massively… Read More
GlobalFoundries Pivots in China
China has always been an intriguing semiconductor puzzle that very few companies have solved and now it is much more puzzling with the current political meandering. The GlobalFoundries vision of having foundries all over the world was very appealing to me back in 2009 and even more so today. Remember, China consumes more than half… Read More
Coupled Electro-thermal Analysis Essential for PowerMOS Design
Power device designers know that when they see a deceptively simple pair of PowerMOS device symbols in the output stage of a power converter circuit schematic, they are actually looking at a massively complex network of silicon and metal interconnect. The corresponding physical devices can have a total device W on the order of … Read More
Emulation from In Circuit to In Virtual
At a superficial level, emulation in the hardware design world is just a way to run a simulation faster. The design to be tested runs on the emulator, connected to whatever test mechanisms you desire, and the whole setup can run many orders of magnitude faster than it could if the design was running inside a software simulator. And … Read More
Restoring Digital Trust – Can China Lead the Way?
I read with interest the US Chamber of Commerce’s assessment of the Made in China (MIC) 2025 plan to transform the world’s most populous nation into an Advanced Manufacturing leader. MIC 2025 covers 10 strategic industries that China identifies as critical to economic growth in the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century, including next-gen… Read More
Open-Silicon Embraces the Latest ISO 9001 Specification with Certification by SGS
A quality standard that stays static and is not itself targeted for continuous improvement, is a standard that is breaking one of the first tenets of quality. This is why the ISO 9001 specification has been updated several times since its introduction in 1987. The first version was fairly modest. The most recent version was released… Read More
Home Automation IoT Company Cuts ASIC Testing Costs
Customer Case Study
digitalSTROM develops smart home automation solutions providing users with superior comfort and a whole new style of living. Based on proprietary ASIC and software, digitalSTROM’s solutions connect electrical household appliances through existing power lines and enable an intelligent home via light… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside