Performance, Power and Area (PPA) metrics are the driving force in the semiconductor market and impact all electronic products that are developed. PPA tradeoff decisions are not engineering decisions, but rather business decisions made by product companies as they decide to enter target end markets. As such, the sooner a company… Read More




Anirudh Keynote at Cadence Live
Anirudh is an engaging speaker with a passion for technology. Acknowledging the sign of the times, he sees significant value-add in AI but reminded us that it is a still supporting actor in system design and other applications where star roles will continue to be played by computational software that’s founded in hard science, … Read More
Formal-based RISC-V processor verification gets deeper than simulation
The flexibility of RISC-V processor IP allows much freedom to meet specific requirements – but it also opens the potential for many bugs created during the design process. Advanced processor features are especially prone to errors, increasing the difficulty and time needed for thorough verification. Born out of necessity, … Read More
Podcast EP159: The Fourth Quarter ESDA Market Data Report with Dr. Walden Rhines
Dan discusses the recent Q4 2022 ESDA report with Wally Rhines, Executive Sponsor of the SEMI Electronic Design Market Data report. Overall, the report portrays strong growth and positive results. Dan explores some anomalies in the data and possible reasons with Wally.
Dan also discusses some very interesting events at the upcoming… Read More
Petri Nets Validating DRAM Protocols. Innovation in Verification
A Petri nets blog scored highest in engagement last year. This month we review application of the technique to validating an expanding range of JEDEC memory standards. Paul Cunningham (Senior VP/GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue… Read More
Podcast EP158: The Benefits of a Unified HW/SW Architecture for AI with Quadric’s Nigel Drego
Dan is joined by Nigel Drego, the CTO and Co-founder at Quadric. Nigel brings extensive experience in software and hardware design to his role at Quadric. Nigel is an expert in computer architectures, compiler technology, and software frameworks.
Dan explores the unique and unified HW/SW architecture developed by Quadric with… Read More
CEO Interview: Ravi Thummarukudy of Mobiveil
Mobiveil Marks 11th Anniversary
Ravi Thummarukudy is Mobiveil’s Chief Executive Officer and a founder. He and I recently spent an enjoyable afternoon getting acquainted as I learned more about Mobiveil. It’s an inspiring story of a technology company in the semiconductor space helping customers and prospering.
Eleven-year-old… Read More
TSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium Overview Part 5
TSMC also covered manufacturing excellence. The TSMC “Trusted Foundry” tagline has many aspects to it, but manufacturing is a critical one. TSMC is the foundry capacity leader but there is a lot more to manufacturing as you will read here. Which brings us to the manufacturing accomplishments from the briefing:
To
… Read MoreTSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium Overview Part 4
TSMC covered their specialty technologies in great detail. Specialty is what we inside the ecosystem used to call weird stuff meaning non-mainstream and fairly difficult to do on leading edge processes. Specialty technologies will play an even more important part of semiconductor design with the advent of chiplets where die… Read More
TSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium Overview Part 3
TSMC’s 3DFabric initiative was a big focus at the symposium, as it should be. I remember when TSMC first went public with CoWos the semiconductor ecosystem, including yours truly, let out a collective sigh wondering why TSMC is venturing into the comparatively low margin world of packaging. Now we know why and it is absolutely… Read More
Rethinking Multipatterning for 2nm Node