It was a very late evening, perhaps 11 PM, on a warm summer night in 2008. Someone sent an email to info@cliosoft.com with a very odd question – why were we not listed in Wikipedia? The sender was a scientist working for the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Of course, this piqued my curiosity and I replied back asking why that concerns… Read More
PDF Solutions' AI-Driven Collaboration & Smarter DecisionsWhen most people hear the term PDF, they…Read More
Bringing Low-Frequency Noise into FocusKey takeaways The challenge of acquiring high-quality, reproducible…Read More
A Brief History of TSMC Through 2025Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's largest dedicated…Read More
Google's Road Trip to RISC-V at Warehouse Scale: Insights from Google's Martin DixonIn an engaging presentation at a recent RISC-V…Read More
Bridging Embedded and Cloud Worlds: AWS Solutions for RISC-V DevelopmentIn a compelling keynote at the RISC-V Summit…Read MoreParallel-Based PHY IP for Die-to-Die Connectivity
Synopsys has released a Technical Bulletin entitled “Parallel-Based PHY IP for Die-to-Die Connectivity”. The piece is authored by Manuel Mota, senior product marketing manager, staff at Synopsys. Manuel has worked at Synopsys for 11 years in the IP area. Prior to that, he worked at MIPS Technologies, Chipidea (acquired… Read More
Anirudh CadenceLIVE Plays Up Computational Software
Cadence has clearly found its groove with Intelligent System Design, something that Lip-Bu reinforced in the CadenceLIVE kickoff keynote on Tuesday, August 11th. Anirudh Devgan, president of Cadence, continued to discuss the theme in his keynote on Wednesday, August 12th with his equally consistent subtitle—”Strength… Read More
Electronics Production Healthy
Global electronics production is healthy, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The chart below shows the three-month-average change versus a year ago (3/12 change) in electronics production (measured in local currency) for the major Asian producers. China is the largest electronics manufacturing country and the original source… Read More
Reverse-engineering the First FPGA Chip Xilinx XC2064
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypto miner. An FPGA consists of many logic blocks, each typically consisting of a flip flop and a logic function, along with a routing network that connects the logic blocks. What makes an FPGA… Read More
GLOBALFOUNDRIES Goes Virtual with 2020 Global Technology Conference Series!
GlobalFoundries is one of the more interesting semiconductor stories of this decade. They started as a spinout of the AMD fabs then acquired Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing in 2009 and the IBM Microelectronics business in 2014.
Now that events are virtual it is a great time for my fellow semiconductor professionals to
AI in Korea. Low-Key PR, Active Development
Based on press coverage and technical paper volume, you could be forgiven for thinking that Korea had decided to take a pass on AI mania, or maybe just to dabble a little here and there to stay abreast of trends. But you’d be wrong. Korea is very active in AI; they don’t feel a need to trumpet what they’re doing from the rooftops. If you … Read More
Trusted IoT Ecosystem for Security – Created by the GSA and Chaired by Mentor/Siemens
There’s a lot to keep you awake at night these days. If you live in California, it’s wildfires and unbreathable air. If you live on planet Earth, it’s COVID-19. And if you’re part of the value chain for IoT, it’s the security and robustness of the silicon and software fabric that connects our world. This fabric connects everything,… Read More
CEO Interview: Pengwei Qian of SkillCAD
Pengwei Qian is the founder and CEO of SkillCAD, a grassroots EDA company that has amassed the most impressive customer list (60+ companies) I have experienced for a company of this size, absolutely.
Pengwei has a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and a Masters in Material Science from Fudan University and a Masters in Electronic Engineering… Read More
VLSI Symposium 2020 – Imec Monolithic CFET
The 2020 VLSI Technology Symposium was held as a virtual conference from June 14th through June 19th. At the symposium Imec gave an interesting paper on Monolithic CFET and I had a chance to interview one of the authors, Hiroaki Arimura.
It is well known in the industry that FinFETs (FF) are reaching the end of their scaling life. Samsung… Read More


Quantum Computing Technologies and Challenges