Earlier this year semiconductor oracle Malcom Penn did his 2022 forecast which I covered here: Are We Headed for a Semiconductor Crash? The big difference with this update is the black economic clouds that are looming which may again highlight Malcolm’s forecasting prowess. I spent an hour with Malcolm and company on his Zoom cast… Read More
CTO Interview with Taylor Barton of Certus SemiconductorTaylor Barton is a Lead Analog/Mixed-Signal and I/O…Read More
Generating Chip Subsystems Automatically: A New Answer to Manage Chip Design Complexity By Defacto Staff Today’s chips are no longer…Read More
Reimagining 3D IC Design: From Architecture to SignoffBy Keith Felton, Andras Vass-Varnai and Todd Burkholder,…Read More
GSA Honors Sanjay Mehrotra as Memory Takes Center Stage in ComputingThe Global Semiconductor Alliance will present Micron Technology…Read More
NIST Sets a Clearer Course for the Post-Quantum Security TransitionNIST’s report, Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards, gives…Read MoreScaling is Failing with Moore’s Law and Dennard
Looking backward and forward, the white paper from Codasip “Scaling is Failing” by Roddy Urquhart provides an interesting history of processor development since the early 1970s to the present. However it doesn’t stop there and continues to extrapolate what the chip industry has in store for the rest of this decade. For the last… Read More
Podcast EP78: A Tour of DAC 2022 with Rob Oshana, General Chair
Dan is joined by Rob Oshana, general chair of this year’s DAC. Rob is vice president of software engineering R&D for the Edge Processing business line at NXP. He serves on multiple industry advisory boards and is a recognized international speaker. He has published numerous books and articles on software engineering… Read More
Why Software Rules AI Success at the Edge
It is an unavoidable fact that machine learning (ML) hardware architectures are evolving rapidly. Initially most visible in datacenters (many hyperscalars have built their own AI chips), the trend is now red-hot in inference engines for the edge, each spinning new ground-breaking methods. Markets demand these advances to … Read More
High-speed, low-power, Hybrid ADC at IP-SoC
Andrew Levy and I both worked at Intel and Opmaxx, and I knew that he was now working at Alphacore, an IP company specializing in mixed-signal, RF, imaging and rad-hard applications. I was curious what Alphacore was up to, so at the IP-SoC Silicon Valley 2022 event I watched the ADC presentation from Ken Potts, COO of Alphacore. Mr.… Read More
WEBINAR: Challenges in analyzing High Performance clocks at 7nm and below process nodes
Proper clock functionality and performance are essential for SoC operation. Static timing analysis (STA) tools have served well for verifying clocks, yet with new advanced process nodes, lower operating voltages, higher clock speeds and higher reliability requirements, STA tools alone can’t perform the kinds of analysis… Read More
Designing Ultra-Low-Power, Always On IP
It’s popular to use DSP chips for vision processing in diverse applications like ADAS, security cameras and AR. Tensilica has been designing DSP chips and IP since 1997, and their technology was successful enough that Cadence acquired Tensilica back in 2013. At the IP-SoC Silicon Valley 2022 event in April I had the pleasure… Read More
Advantages of Large-Scale Synchronous Clocking Domains in AI Chip Designs
We are currently in the hockey stick growth phase of AI. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are happening at a lightning pace. And, while the rate of adoption is exploding, so is model size. Over the past couple of years, we’ve gone from about two billion parameters to Google Brain’s recently announced trillion-parameter… Read More
Demonstration of Dose-Driven Photoelectron Spread in EUV Resists
As a consequence of having a ~13.5 nm wavelength, EUV photons transfer ~90% of their energy to ionized photoelectrons. Thus, EUV lithography is fundamentally mostly EUV photoelectron lithography. The actual resolution becomes dependent on photoelectron trajectories.
Photoelectron trajectories in EUV lithography were… Read More
The Jig is Up for Car Data Brokers
The same week that John Oliver took on the topic of privacy on his HBO program “Last Week Tonight,” one of the leading automotive data brokers – Otonomo – became the target of a class action lawsuit in California. While Oliver detailed the creepiness of everyday privacy violations on computers, mobile phones, and connected televisions,… Read More


The $725 Million Chip Development: Why Execution Risk, Not IP Cost, Now Dictates Advanced-Node Survival