Simulation dominates hardware functional verification today and likely will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile formal verification, once thought to be a possible challenger for the title, has instead converged on a more effective role as a complement to simulation. Formal excels at finding problems… Read More




How many engineers does it take to get an IoT security certificate?
Spoiler alert, the answer is none!
Let me take you back to the beginning to explain that answer.
For the sake of this discussion, I will reduce a complex IoT solution to three fundamental blocks:
- IoT node
- IoT Gateway
- IoT Server
The IoT node is a sensor that converts analog, physical world context into digital data. The node has to have… Read More
Autonomous Automobile Update ISS 2018
As a car enthusiast and a semiconductor professional the latest automotive trends are of great interest to me. My father raced sports cars and I remember being part of the pit crew (but not really) and impatiently waiting for my turn to drive. The years before my 16[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday when I could legally drive were the slowest… Read More
A New Year’s resolution: Turn off computers
Facebook’s recent acknowledgment that social media may be making its users feel bad in some cases is a significant milestone. So far, the technology industry hardly has talked about the downsides of their products. Now a realization seems to be setting in that perhaps something has gone wrong along the way.
Academic research that… Read More
Moore’s Law Drives Foundries and IP Providers
2017 was a banner year for semiconductor sales as they topped $400B for the first time, an increase of some 20%, there is happiness in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, South Korea, and well, everywhere. With the foundries pushing to ever-smaller process dimensions and even going back to mature nodes and offering more variations that are… Read More
ISS 2018 – The Impact of EUV on the Semiconductor Supply Chain
I was invited to give a talk at the ISS conference on the Impact of EUV on the Semiconductor Supply Chain. The ISS conference is an annual gathering of semiconductor executives to review technology and global trends. In this article I will walk through my presentation and conclusions.… Read More
Thermal Modeling for ADAS goes MultiPhysics
In electronic system design, we have grown comfortable with the idea that different regimes of analysis, such as the chip, the package and the system, or electrical, thermal and stress are more or less independent – what starts in one regime stays in that regime, give or take some margin information passed onto other regimes. And… Read More
A Reliable Way to Forecast Growth of Semiconductor Markets
Wally Rhines, President and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Group, did another one of his famous deep learning presentations at SEMI ISS 2018. Using the Gompertz Curve Lifecycle to forecast the future growth of semiconductor markets, Wally looks at: Image sensors, Desktop PCs, PC Notebooks, Cell Phone Subscribers, Smartphones, and… Read More
Mentor Tessent Products Ready for Second Edition of ISO 26262 Coming in March 2018
Have you notice how smart your automobile is getting? Watching the first round of NFL playoffs I lost count on the number of TV commercials showing cars weaving through tight construction zones (and Star Wars figures), big trucks parking in incredibly tight spaces, cars avoiding rear-end collisions and pedestrians, and even … Read More
A Golden Age for Semiconductor Growth at ISS 2018
The SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS 2018) started today with session one on economic trends. Daniel Niles (Alpha One Capital Partners) started it off with “A Golden Age for Global Growth – Semiconductor revenues up over 20% y/y (The Good News is Also the Bad News)”. The good news of course is that semiconductors continue… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?