Electronics production has recovered strongly from slowdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most major Asian electronic producers reported double-digit increases in early 2021. The chart below shows three-month-average change versus a year ago for electronics production. The data is from each country’s official statistics… Read More





Executive Interview: Casper van Oosten of Intermolecular, Inc.
Casper van Oosten is the Business Field Head and Managing Director for Intermolecular, Inc., acquired by Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany in 2019. Prior to this role, Casper worked in various roles on Eyrise™ Dynamic Liquid Crystal Window in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, at an affiliate of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. Casper… Read More
IP and Software Speeds up TWS Earbud SoC Development
The global market for earphones and headphones in 2020 is estimated to have been $34B and is expanding at a compound rate of over 20% per year. Of this almost 50% is said to be earphones which are shifting rapidly to True Wireless Stereo (TWS). We have seen the sales of TWS devices grow from 1M units is 2016 to 109M units in 2019, though … Read More
Resistive RAM (ReRAM) Computing-in-Memory IP Macro for Machine Learning
The term von Neumann bottleneck is used to denote the issue with the efficiency of the architecture that separates computational resources from data memory. The transfer of data from memory to the CPU contributes substantially to the latency, and dissipates a significant percentage of the overall energy associated with … Read More
SPIE 2021 – ASML DUV and EUV Updates
At the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference held in February, ASML presented the latest information on their Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) exposure systems. I recently got to interview Mike Lercel of ASML to discuss the presentations.
DUV
Despite all the attention EUV is getting, most layers are still… Read More
Quantum Tunneling for OTPs, PUFs: Higher security
I’ve had a number of enjoyable discussions with John East who ran Actel until it was acquired. (John and Actel devices also play an important role in my book, The Tell-Tale Entrepreneur.) This is relevant because Actel were well-known for their anti-fuse FPGAs. eMemory Technology, the subject of this blog, also produce an anti-fuse… Read More
Delivering True Wireless Stereo (TWS) Experience
A recent blog about the Hearables market covered how expansive and far reaching the product opportunities promise to be. Of course, consumer purchase criteria will drive the product realizations, adoptions and consequently the market success of each of these envisioned products. Whether it is the earbud product or one of those… Read More
Electromagnetic and Circuit RLCK Extraction and Simulation for Advanced Silicon, Interposers and Package Designs
For years, there have been rather distinct domains for the extraction of interconnect models from physical design data.
Chip designers commonly focused on RC parasitics for circuit/path delay calculations and dynamic I*R voltage drop analysis. The annotation of extracted parasitics to a netlist model required the layout… Read More
Enabling Edge AI Vision with RISC-V and a Silicon Platform
AI vision processing moving to the edge is an undeniable industry trend. OpenFive, the custom silicon business unit of SiFive, discusses this trend with compelling facts in their recent paper titled “Enabling AI Vision at the Edge.” AI vision is being deployed in many applications, such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, … Read More
Sondrel Explains One of the Secrets of Its Success – NoC Design
Sondrel is an interesting and unique company. They are a supplier of turnkey services from system to silicon supply. So far, not that unique as there are a lot of companies with this mission. What is unique is their focus on complex designs. The company takes on the design of chips that would need teams of engineers working for a year… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet