The original Silicon Shield theory, as described in my 2001 book, stated that Taiwan’s role as producer of 90 per cent of the world’s IT products (at that time) protected it from an attack by China because the United States, acting in its own self interest, would come to the island’s defense. A similar scenario – involving oil,… Read More




Podcast EP90: A Tour of Cadence’s Cloud Solutions with Mahesh Turaga
Dan is joined by Mahesh Turaga, VP of Cloud Business Development at Cadence Design Systems. Mahesh brings extensive customer-facing experience to Cadence in business development, strategy, pre-sales, and consulting. He provides an overview of the cloud solutions provided by Cadence. The various business models, technical… Read More
ASML EUV Update at SPIE
At the 2022 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference, ASML presented an update on EUV. I recently had a chance to go over the presentations with Mike Lercel of ASML. The following is a summary of our discussions.
0.33 NA
The 0.33 NA EUV systems are the production workhorse systems for leading edge lithography today. 0.33 NA systems are… Read More
Using STA with Aging Analysis for Robust IC Designs
Our laptops and desktop computers have billions of transistors in their application processor chips, yet I often don’t consider the reliability effects of aging that the transistors experience in the chips. At the recent Synopsys User Group (aka SNUG), there was a technical presentation on this topic from Srinivas Bodapati,… Read More
Scaling Safety Analysis. Reusability for FMEDA
It is common when a new type of analysis is introduced in almost any domain that it works well enough for a while. Until it begins to struggle with growing problem size, prompting refinements to the methodology to allow continued scaling. We see this routinely in analytics for SoC design, so it should not be a big surprise that safety… Read More
Podcast EP89: An Overview of NXP’s MCX MCU Products with CK Phua
Dan is joined by CK Phua of NXP. CK joined Philips Semiconductors in 1993 and worked in various roles including quality, applications engineering, product engineering and technical marketing. After Philips, CK joined Freescale in 2012 and rejoined NXP through the Freescale merger. CK is now a Product Manager for Microcontrollers… Read More
TSMC 2022 Technology Symposium Review – Process Technology Development
TSMC recently held their annual Technology Symposium in Santa Clara, CA. The presentations provided a comprehensive overview of their status and upcoming roadmap, covering all facets of process technology and advanced packaging development. This article will summarize the highlights of the process technology updates… Read More
Qualcomm’s AI play
Qualcomm is a common name in mobile industry for chips. The company has generated $33 billion in revenue in 2021 and continues to march ahead with its innovations. However, Qualcomm doesn’t get the same visibility and mention as Nvidia and Intel in the world of AI chips. By our estimate, Qualcomm’s contribution to … Read More
A Fresh Look at HLS Value
I’ve written several articles on High-Level Synthesis (HLS), designing in C, C++ or SystemC, then synthesizing to RTL. There is unquestionable appeal to the concept. A higher level of abstraction enables a function to be described in less lines of code (LOC). Which immediately offers higher productivity and implies less bugs… Read More
How to Cut Costs of Conversational AI by up to 90%
The burgeoning use of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) in consumer and business applications places a heavy computational burden on both front-end and back-end systems that provide the natural language processing (NLP). NLP systems rely on deep learning (a subset of machine learning) to automate speech recognition,… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption