The irony around this topic in the middle of the coronavirus scare – when more of us are working remotely through the cloud – is not lost on me. Nevertheless, ingrained beliefs move slowly so it’s still worth shedding further light. There is a tribal wisdom among chip designers that what we do demands much higher security than any other… Read More





COVID-19 and Chinese Automotive Innovation
It’s a shame that the U.S. president and his administration have chosen to criticize and attack China for its poor management of the novel coronavirus crisis. It is rapidly becoming evident that China now knows more than any other country how to effectively confront the pathogen and bring it to its knees.
Rather than reaching
Chip-to-Chip Communication for Enterprise and Cloud
I recently had the opportunity to attend a SemiWiki webinar entitled “Chip-to-Chip Communication for Enterprise and Cloud”. The webinar was presented by SiFive and explored chip-to-chip communication strategies for a variety of applications. In the first part of the webinar, Ketan Mehta, director of SoC IP product marketing… Read More
Webinar on eNVM Choices at 28nm and below by Globalfoundries
Embedded non-volatile memory (eNVM) plays an essential role in most systems and SoCs. eFLASH has found its way into a wide range of devices, including automotive, industrial, IoT and those in a mixture of other markets. NAND Flash has proven to be a workhorse in all of these areas. For instance, MCUs use them for code and data storage… Read More
PSS, Test Realization and Reuse
Mentor just released a white paper on this topic which I confess has taxed my abilities to blog the topic. It’s not that the white paper is not worthy – I’m sure it is. I’m less sure that I’m worthy to blog on such a detailed technical paper. But I’m always up for a challenge, so let’s see what I can make of this, extracting a quick and not very… Read More
Mixed-Signal Debugging Gets a Boost
Having the right tool for the job at hand is always a joy, and when your IC project involves RTL code, gates, transistors and even parasitic interconnect, then you need some EDA tool help for debugging and finding out why your design behaves the way it is. An FAE named Sujit Roy did a conference call with me last week to show what StarVision… Read More
Newsflash Chip Equip Blockade Back on!
Blocking chip sales to Huawei back on front burner
Covid19 & China Trade are equally bad
Long lived Uncertainty could “plague” industry sales going forward
Political Predictability worse than Disease Predictability
Reuters broke a story today that the proposed licensing of chip equipment to prevent “bad… Read More
Shut Uber Down Now
By now it is pretty clear that everywhere outside of China and South Korea human beings are doing a lousy job of “social distancing,” locking down, and sheltering in place. This is unfortunate because experts agree that only a complete lockdown will stop COVID-19 from infecting millions, continuing to kill thousands,
Tesla’s 2019 Turning Point
2019 will be remembered as the year the automotive industry decided to right-size its autonomous vehicle ambitions. Multiple auto makers tempered their vaunted claims for delivering fully autonomous cars within a few years and Daimler Chairman of the Board Ola Kälenius declared in December that the pursuit of autonomous “robotaxis”
Filling the ASIC Void – Part 1
It started slowly at first. Then it began picking up steam. I’m referring to consolidation in the semiconductor sector. I had a front-row seat for what consolidation did to the ASIC part of semiconductor and that is the topic of this discussion. I was the VP of marketing at eSilicon, the company that invented the fabless ASIC model.… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet