I met Andy Grove on a sunny day in New York City in 1987. He was dashing to press interviews for his just-off-the-presses management book, “One on One with Andy Grove.” I was a freshly badged member of the press working for IEEE Spectrum, a year or so out of college, still toting my college backpack. Little did I know that that would be … Read More





Podcast Episode 25: Silicon IP for Early-Stage Semiconductor Companies
Moderator:
Daniel Nenni, Semiwiki
Panelists:
Jothy Rosenberg, CEO Dover Microsystems
John Terry, CEO Espre Technologies
Fares Mubarak, CEO Spark Microsystems
General Theme: A discussion around the requirements and challenges of investigation and ultimate selection of IP for early-stage chip companies, discussing both… Read More
There’s No Such Thing as Ground (But Perhaps There’s a Bob) Minimze Your Ports
I would contend there is no job quite like working as a support engineer for a simulation tool like Ansys HFSS. Such a role forces an engineer to understand technology in breadth and depth like no other because HFSS is applied to such a broad range of applications and products throughout the world. My own introduction to HFSS began … Read More
Alchip is Painting a Bright Future for the ASIC Market
I’ve spent most of my career in the ASIC business. In 2003, Gartner predicted the ASIC market would grow to $16.9B. During that time, there were a number of startups building ASICs, but the applications were a bit specialized and aimed at new markets. Consequently, there was a lot of risk to build a chip startup and many ASICs either… Read More
Ferroelectric Hafnia-based Materials for Neuromorphic ICs
The ferroelectric effect in materials has been exploited to fabricate (fab) reliable Ferroelectric Random Access Memories (FRAM) Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) ICs for over 20 years. Recent years have seen have seen a breakthrough in discovering ferroelectric properties in Hafnium Oxide (HfO2 or “hafnia”), a fab-friendly… Read More
Silicon Photonics Solutions Address Bandwidth, Reach, and Power Challenges
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged on GlobalFoundries’ silicon technologies supporting automotive radar applications. This time it is on GlobalFoundries’ silicon photonics technology which expects to find adoption in a broad spectrum of applications. The blog is based on listening to a technology presentation made by Dr. … Read More
Connecting System Design to the Enterprise
While systems design underpins the explosion in “smart everything”, it remains somewhat isolated from another explosion—the proliferation of tools for application lifecycle management (ALM). ALM tools are prevalent on the web, in the cloud and on our phones, to streamline product design and build, to track correspondence… Read More
“Kandou it”
In another departure from my chip design verification “beat,” I took a look at Kandou and like what I learned.
Kandou from Lausanne, Switzerland, boasts “Kandou It” as its tagline and as it should be if Kandou’s USB-C multi-protocol retimer solution with USB4 support is inside next-gen laptops, notebooks, desktops, tablets and… Read More
Highlights of the TSMC Technology Symposium 2021 – Automotive
At the recent TSMC Technology Symposium, TSMC provided a detailed discussion of their development roadmaps. Previous articles have reviewed the highlights of silicon process and packaging technologies. The automotive platform received considerable emphasis at the Symposium – this article specifically focuses on the… Read More
Keynote from Google at CadenceLIVE Americas 2021
Last week, Cadence hosted its annual CadenceLIVE Americas 2021 conference. Four keynotes and eighty-three different talks on various topics were presented. The talks were delivered by Cadence, its customers and partners.
One of the keynotes was from Partha Ranganathan, VP and Engineering Fellow from Google. His talk was titled,… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet