Let’s face it, AI is everywhere. From the cloud to the edge to your pocket, there is more and more embedded intelligence fueling efficiency and features. It’s sometimes hard to discern where human interaction ends, and machine interaction begins. The technology that underlies all this is quite complex and daunting to understand.… Read More





Happy Birthday UVM! A Very Grown-Up 10-Year-Old
.The UVM standard was first released by Accellera 10 years ago this month and is now by far the leading methodology for functionally verifying logic designs, especially at the block level. As I write, DVCon fast approaches so I talked to Tom Fitzpatrick, Verification Technologist at Siemens EDA (Mentor Graphics) for a perspective.… Read More
Expert Advice for the New Intel CEO
Intel is a semiconductor legend. Founded on July 18, 1968, the name Intel is short for Integrated Electronics. After leading Silicon Valley, the United Sates, and the world into the era of semiconductors through technical excellence, Intel has hit some challenging times. There has been quite a bit of CEO drama that we will look … Read More
Intel Node Names
There is a lot of interest right now in how Intel compares to the leading foundries and what the future may hold.
Several years ago, I published several extremely popular articles converting processes from various companies to “Equivalent Nodes” (EN). Nodes were at one time based on actual physical features of processes but had… Read More
How SerDes Became Key IP for Semiconductor Systems
We have seen that the interface IP category is seeing incredibly high growth rate over the last two decades and we expect this category to generate an ongoing high source of IP revenues for at least another decade. But if we dig into the various successful protocols like PCI Express, Ethernet or USB, we can detect a common function … Read More
Semiconductors up 6.5% in 2020, >10% in 2021?
Semiconductor sales in 2020 were $439.0 billion, up 6.5% from $412.3 billion in 2019, according to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS).
We at Semiconductor Intelligence have been tracking the accuracy of semiconductor market forecasts from various sources for several years. We look at publicly available projections… Read More
Podcast EP7: Signal Integrity and Killer Robots
Dan and Mike are joined by Matt Burns, technical marketing manager at Samtec. Matt discusses the signal integrity challenges faced by system designers. The materials and protocols used for channels on a board, between boards on a rack and even between racks are discussed. Matt also touches on the work Samtec is doing with BattleBots.… Read More
CEO Interview: Sathyam Pattanam
Sathyam has over 35 years of experience in company management, R&D management and software development in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) (mostly) and PCB Manufacturing. He has headed companies, global engineering and marketing organizations in Forture-500 and in startups companies to introduce innovative and … Read More
“For Want of a Chip, the Auto Industry was Lost”
Semiconductor production can’t be turned on and off like a switch
Semiconductor fabs have to run 24/7 to make money. They have to be running full all the time to fully utilize the high running costs and in the case of new fabs, high capital costs.
Unlike a brake pad factory hat can hire and fire people at will and source readily … Read More
Need Electromagnetic Simulations for ICs?
Electromagnetic (EM) simulations have been performed on die metal structures since the 1990s. Originally, the analysis was restricted to a single device (e.g., a spiral inductor). The number of on-die devices simulated simultaneously grew with the increasing capabilities of the computers performing the computations. This… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet