Rich Weber co-founded Semifore in 2006 with Jamsheed Agahi. Rich has a long history of complex chip and system design at companies including Data General, Stardent, Silicon Graphics, StratumOne and Cisco Systems. He received an MS in Electrical Engineering and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.… Read More





Lam Research performing like a Lion – Chip equip on steroids
– Business is about as good as it gets- $75B WFE in 2021?
– China remains strong at 32% despite SMIC lack of license
– NAND remains 48% of revs versus 31% foundry
– DRAM steady @ 14% – Service was record $1.3B
Strong results in a strong market
Lam reported revenues of $3.85B and EPS of $7.49 for the March… Read More
Accelerating Cache Coherence Verification
It would be nice if there were a pre-packaged set of assertions which could formally check all aspects of cache coherence in an SoC. In fact, formal checks do a very nice job for the control aspects of a coherent network. But that covers only one part of the cache coherence verification task. Dataflow checks are just as important, where… Read More
Chip Shortage, COVID-19 Unmasks Transit Gaps
I haven’t traveled a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic, but I have flown a few times around the U.S. As a former frequent flyer I pride myself on anticipating most travel circumstances and not being surprised or blindsided, but two recent visits to Austin, Texas, changed that when I couldn’t find a rental car.
It was just 12 months … Read More
Arteris IP Contributes to Major MPSoC Text
You might have heard of the Multicore and Multiprocessor SoC (MPSoC) Forum sponsored by IEEE and other industry associations and companies. This group of top-notch academic and industry technical leaders gets together once a year to talk about hardware and software architecture and applications for multicore and multiprocessor… Read More
ASML early signs of an order Tsunami – Managing the ramp
Taiwan and Korea represented 43% and 44% respectively with China at 15% and Japan and the US in the far distance.
ASML a tidal wave of orders
On the call management talked about logic potentially being up 30% in 2021 and memory being up potentially 50%. While we thing foundry/logic will clearly be on fir we think memory will lag a bit.… Read More
Agile and Verification, Validation. Innovation in Verification
Agile methods in hardware design are becoming topical again. What does this mean for verification? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence) and I continue our series on research ideas. We’re also honored this month to welcome Raúl Camposano to our blog as a very distinguished replacement for Jim Hogan. As always, feedback… Read More
Small EDA Company with Something New: SoC Compiler
I read the semiconductor press, LinkedIn and social media (Twitter, Facebook) every morning along with an RSS feed that I setup, staying current on everything related to using EDA tools to make the task of SoC design a bit easier for design teams. A recent press release announced a tool called SoC Compiler, so my curiosity was piqued… Read More
PCIe 6.0 Doubles Speed with New Modulation Technique
PCI-SIG has held to doubling PCIe’s data rate with each revision of the specification. The consortium of 800 companies, with its board consisting of Agilent, AMD, Dell, HP, Intel, Synopsys, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, is continuing this trend with the PCIe 6.0 specification which calls for a transfer rate of 64 GT/s. PCI-SIG released… Read More
It’s not a Semiconductor Shortage It’s Demand Delirium & Poor Planning
-The semiconductor industry is not to blame its the customers
-How do you fix something that’s not really broken?
-Long taken for granted, semi’s are sexy again
-Pawns in a Political Power Play?
Its not the chip makers that screwed up. It’s the customers that stressed the system beyond breaking
The semiconductor… Read More
MediaTek Develops Chip Utilizing TSMC’s 2nm Process, Achieving Milestones in Performance and Power Efficiency