Anyone who has started a company knows that landing the seed round of investment is just the beginning. There are many decisions to face. When to start building a sales team? What parts of the company’s infrastructure to outsource? How to price and promote your product? These are just a few of the questions to be answered. If your… Read More





Webinar: Real-time In-Chip Monitoring to Boost multi-core AI, ML, DL Systems
During the COVID-19 pandemic I’m using Zoom and attending more webinars to keep updated on semiconductor industry trends, and one huge trend is the importance of AI applied to SoCs. Using more cores to handle ML and DL makes sense, but then how do you keep the chips within their power and reliability limits while at the same … Read More
AI, Safety and Low Power, Compounding Complexity
The nexus of complexity in SoC design these days has to be in automotive ADAS devices. Arteris IP highlighted this in the Linley Processor Conference recently where they talked about an ADAS chip that Toshiba had built. This has multiple vision and AI accelerators, both DSP and DNN-based. It is clearly aiming for ISO 26262 ASIL D … Read More
Synopsys – Turbocharging the TCAM Portfolio with eSilicon
About 90 days ago, Synopsys completed the acquisition of certain IP assets from eSilicon. The remaining entirety of eSilicon was acquired by Inphi Corporation. I was the VP of marketing at eSilicon during that acquisition so it’s very interesting to me to find out how things are going with those certain IP assets. I got an opportunity… Read More
SiFive’s Approach to Embedding Intelligence Everywhere
Before the advent of RISC-V, designers looking for embedded processors were effectively limited to a handful of proprietary processors using ISAs from decades ago. While the major ISAs are being updated and enhanced, they also are facing limitations from many decisions made over many years. RISC-V was conceived with a clean… Read More
Preventing a Product Security Crisis
The video conference company Zoom has skyrocketed to new heights and plummeted to new lows in the past few weeks. It is one of the handful of communications applications that is perfectly suited to a world beset by quarantine actions, yet has fallen far from grace because of poor security, privacy, and transparency. Governments,… Read More
COVID-19 Cars as an Essential Service
The Automotive News reported Friday that updated guidance from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Iinfrastructure Security Agency had identified cars as an essential service. AN reported: “The new guidelines include “workers critical to the manufacturing, distribution, sales,
LRCX Supply constrained by Covid Crisis
Lam Q1 revenue soft by roughly 15% due to supply side
Demand remains solid for Q2 but beyond that, dubious
No guide but Q2 could be => Q1 revenues
NAND solid, China big @ 32%, Foundry remains great
Lam reported a solid quarter but light on revenues…
It was no surprise that Lam reported revenues of $2.5B versus their original… Read More
Key Applications for Chip Monitoring
One of the side benefits of working with SemiWiki is that you get to meet a broad range of people and in the semiconductor industry that means a broad range of very smart people, absolutely. Recently I had the pleasure to meet Richard McPartland of Moortec. Richard and I started in the semiconductor industry at the same time but from… Read More
CEO Interview: Jason Xing of Empyrean Software
It’s been about seven years since Randy Smith last interviewed Jason Xing, the President/CEO of North America for Empyrean Software, so the timing felt good for a fresh update. I’ve been watching Empyrean at DAC for several years now, and have come away impressed with their growth and focus on some difficult IC design… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet