In the world of financial trading, nanoseconds count. The faster a trade can be accomplished, the more money a trader can make. Getting a trade in before a competitor also results in improved profits. What does this have to do with the partnership deal recently inked between Silicon Creations and Achronix? Plenty. The two companies… Read More
TSMC’s 2026 AZ Exclusive Experience Day: Bridging Careers and Semiconductor InnovationIn February of 2026, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company…Read More
DAC – The Chips to Systems Conference 2026The Design Automation Chips to Systems Conference is…Read More
Taming Advanced Node Clock Network Challenges: JitterClock jitter rarely fails in obvious ways. In…Read More
Synopsys and AMD Honored for Generative and Agentic AI Vision, Leadership, and ImpactSynopsys and AMD were recently selected by the…Read More
The Foundry Model Is Morphing — AgainWhen Morris Chang left Texas Instruments in 1983 to found TSMC, he was…Read MoreTSMC 2022 Technology Symposium Review – Advanced Packaging Development
TSMC recently held their annual Technology Symposium in Santa Clara, CA. The presentations provide a comprehensive overview of their technology status and upcoming roadmap, covering all facets of the process technology and advanced packaging development. This article will summarize the highlights of the advanced packaging… Read More
Multiphysics, Multivariate Analysis: An Imperative for Today’s 3D-IC Designs
Semiconductor manufacturers are under constantly increasing and intense pressure to accelerate innovative new chip designs to market faster than ever in smaller package sizes while assuring signal integrity and reducing power consumption. Three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D-ICs) promise to answer all these demands… Read More
The Evolution of Taiwan’s Silicon Shield
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


The Risk of Not Optimizing Clock Power