At DesignCon 2020, ANSYS held a series of sponsored presentations. I was able to attend a couple of them. These were excellent events with the material delivered by talented and high-energy speakers. The DesignCon technical program has many dimensions beyond the conference tracks. One of the presentations dealt with 3D ICs.… Read More


Hybrid Verification for Deep Sequential Convergence
I’m always curious to learn what might be new in clock domain crossing (CDC) verification, having dabbled in this area in my past. It’s an arcane but important field, the sort of thing that if missed can put you out of business, but otherwise only a limited number of people want to think about it to any depth.
The core issue is something… Read More
Webinar – FPGA Native Block Floating Point for Optimizing AI/ML Workloads
Block floating point (BFP) has been around for a while but is just now starting to be seen as a very useful technique for performing machine learning operations. It’s worth pointing out up front that bfloat is not the same thing. BFP combines the efficiency of fixed point operations and also offers the dynamic range of full floating… Read More
Build Custom SoC Assembly Platforms
I’ve talked with Defacto on and off for several years – Chouki Aktouf (CEO) and Bastien Gratreaux (Marketing). I was in a similar line of business back in Atrenta. Now I’m just enjoying myself, I’ve written a few blogs for them. I’ll confess I wondered why they wouldn’t struggle with the same problems we’d had. Script-driven RTL editing,… Read More
China Chip Equip Embargo just got real
Worst Case Scenario now possible!
- Embargo could extend beyond China to Taiwan (TSMC)
- Likely backs up ASML pressure & Huawei indictment
- “Maximum Pressure” campaign similar to Iran
- Not likely to go away through trade negotiations
US to restrict chip equipment sales to Huawei producers
The Wall Street Journal… Read More
Semiconductor Recovery in 2020?
Semiconductors down 12% in 2019
World Semiconductor Trades Statistics (WSTS) reported the world semiconductor market in 2019 was $412 billion, a 12.1% decline from $469 billion in 2018. Most of the decline was in the memory market (primarily DRAM and Flash) which was down a third from a year ago. However overall semiconductor … Read More
The COVID-19 Virus Outbreak and the Semiconductor Supply Chain
Welcome to my weekly roundup of the key semiconductor news from around the world from last week. The COVID-19 virus outbreak and it’s impact on the semiconductor supply chain continues to dominate the news, but there was also lots of other news from around the world, so please read on.
Let’s start by a review of where the started… Read More
Cryptocurrency Fraud Reached $4.3 Billion in 2019
Cryptocurrency fraud is aggressively on the rise and topped over $4 billion last year, according to the security tracking company Chainalysis.
This is especially shocking to those who thought they had found an incredible investment in the cryptocurrency world, yet were swindled out of everything. As part of these cryptocurrency… Read More
Edge Computing – The Critical Middle Ground
Ron Lowman, product marketing manager at Synopsys, recently posted an interesting technical bulletin on the Synopsys website entitled How AI in Edge Computing Drives 5G and the IoT. There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the emerging processing hierarchy of edge devices (think cell phone or self-driving car), cloud… Read More
System Level Flows for SoC Architecture Analysis and Design – DVCON 2020
As a professional conference attendee I look for the most meaningful way to spend my time and workshops is one of the best. Especially when a customer is involved and there is no bigger EDA customer than Intel, absolutely.
System Level Flows for SoC Architecture Analysis and Design
Speakers:
Swaminathan Ramachandran – … Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment