Pop quiz – name an event at which an EDA vendor would be unlikely to exhibit. How about The Trading Show in Chicago, later this month? That’s trading as in markets, high-frequency trading, blockchain and all that other trading-centric financial technology. This is another market, like cloud, where performance is everything and… Read More




Building Better Digital Content Protection
Back in college my roommates figured out that the TV cable coax wire was still connected to our apartment. As a result, I was able to watch the Richard Pryor movie Silver Streak about 30 times without a cable box, however the screen was partially jumbled from the simple content protection used back then. This was possible by aggressively… Read More
CEO Interview: Vincent Markus of Menta
What is Menta all about?
Menta was founded to add hardware-programmability within SoCs. We deliver FPGAs in hard IP form that can be readily embedded within an SoC to make certain hardware functions reconfigurable at-will, post-production. This enables customers to dynamically adapt to evolving standards, perform security… Read More
AI is the Catalyst of IoT!
Businesses across the world are rapidly leveraging the Internet-of-Things (#IoT) to create new products and services that are opening up new business opportunities and creating new business models. The resulting transformation is ushering in a new era of how companies run their operations and engage with customers. However,… Read More
Webinar: Next Generation Design Data & Release Management
Design Data Management (DDM) is a bit like insurance. It’s something every semiconductor company has to have, and as a result it’s probably something taken for granted. In order to make their products more useful, the DDM vendors have added more functionality to manage more of the lifecycle of design data.
Dassault’s Synchronicity… Read More
Power Checks for Your Libraries
When your design doesn’t work, who owns that problem? I don’t believe the answer to this question has changed significantly since semiconductor design started, despite distributed sourcing for IP and manufacturing. Some things like yield can (sometimes) be pushed back to the foundry, but mostly the design company owns the problem.… Read More
Webinar on TFT and FPD Design
I knew that the acronym for TFT meant Thin Film Transistors, but I hadn’t heard that FPD stands for Flat Panel Detectors. It turns out the FPD are solid-state sensors used in x-ray applications, similar in operation to image sensors for digital photography and video. I’ll be attending and blogging about what I learn… Read More
Polishing Parallelism
The great thing about competition in free markets is that vendors are always pushing their products to find an edge. You the consumer don’t have to do much to take advantage of these advances (other than possibly paying for new options). You just sit back and watch the tool you use get faster and deliver better QoR. You may think that… Read More
Circuit Design: Anticipate, Analyze, Exploit Variations – Statistical Methods and Optimization
We are happy to publish book reviews, like this one from Dr. Georges Gielen of the KU Leuven in Belgium, for the greater good of the semiconductor ecosystem. So, if you have a semiconductor book you would like to review for fame not fortune let me know.… Read More
ARM’s (Back!) in FD-SOI. NXP’s Showing (Real!) Chips.
“Yes, we’re back,” Ron Moore, VP of ARM’s physical design group told a packed ballroom at the recent FD-SOI Symposium organized in Silicon Valley by the SOI Consortium. FD-SOI gives you a silicon platform that’s highly controllable, enables ultra-low power devices, and is really good with RF, said Ron Moore during his presentation,… Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment