Charles Shi, semiconductor analyst at Needham & Company, an US-based investment bank and asset management firm, hosted an expert call on semiconductor cycles with Malcolm Penn, Founder and CEO of Future Horizons on 18 August 2022, with over 100 financial analysts in attendance. The following bulletin is a summary of the… Read More



Automotive Semiconductor Shortage Over?
Several signs point to an easing of the shortages of semiconductors for automotive applications. However, the production of light vehicles will likely remain below full potential through at least 2023. LMC Automotive’s July forecast of light vehicle production called for 81.7 million units in 2022, up 2% from 2021. LMC’s January… Read More
Enhanced X-NAND flash memory architecture promises faster, denser memories
Although the high-performance X-NAND memory cell and architecture were first introduced in 2020 by Neo Semiconductor, designers at Neo haven’t rested on that accomplishment and recently updated the cell and the architecture in a second-generation implementation to achieve 20X the performance of conventional quad-level-cell… Read More
Getting Ahead with Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment and Related Plasma Reactors
Advanced semiconductor fabrication technology is what makes it possible to pack more and more transistors into a sq.mm of a wafer. The rapidly increasing demand for advanced-process-based chips has created huge market opportunities for semiconductor manufacturing equipment vendors. According to SEMI, worldwide sales … Read More
Automating and Optimizing an ADC with Layout Generators
I first got involved with layout generators back in 1982 while at Intel, and about 10% of a GPU was automatically generated using some code that I wrote. It was an easy task for one engineer to complete, because the circuits were digital, and no optimization was required. In an IEEE paper from the 2022 18th International Conference… Read More
Hazard Detection Using Petri Nets. Innovation in Verification
Modeling and verifying asynchronous systems is a constant challenge. Petri net models may provide an answer. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
The
… Read MoreEDA Product Mix Changes as Hardware-Assisted Verification Gains Momentum
The Design Automation Conference, as always, is a good barometer on the state of EDA and my area of interest, verification. The recent DAC offered plenty of opportunities to check on trends and the status quo.
Remarkably, exhibitors and attendees were upbeat about the chip design landscape despite concerns about supply chain … Read More
WEBINAR: A Revolution in Prototyping and Emulation
This webinar will introduce to you a revolutionary new way to do prototyping and emulation at best-in-class performance, productivity, and pricing by unifying the hardware and a new software stack so one system is capable of prototyping and delivering essential emulation functionality.
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The speed of Moore’s law… Read More
A clear VectorPath when AI inference models are uncertain
The chase to add artificial intelligence (AI) into many complex applications is surfacing a new trend. There’s a sense these applications need a lot of AI inference operations, but very few architects can say precisely what those operations will do. Self-driving may be the best example, where improved AI model research and discovery… Read More
Protecting Critical IP With Next-Generation Zero Trust Security
While semiconductors are the enablers for high-tech solutions, the semiconductor industry was not at the forefront of Cloud adoption. There were many valid concerns behind the slow adoption, a primary reason being the threat to intellectual property (IP) security. IP in this context refers to not just chip building blocks but… Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?