At the recent DesignCon 2020 in Santa Clara, Cadence introduced a new product, Sigrity Aurora. You won’t find a press release about this announcement. Rather, Brad Griffin, product management group director at Cadence, presented Sigrity Aurora in the theater at the Cadence booth. This one caught my eye and deserves some discussion.… Read More





Huawei Sends Unmistakable Message
A funny thing happened on the way to Barcelona for the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) event scheduled for this week. The event organizer – the GSMA – exhibitors and attendees were forced to come to terms with the risk of contracting and spreading the coronavirus – COVID 19.
Several large European, South Korean, and U.S.
High-Level Synthesis at the Edge
Custom AI acceleration continues to gather steam. In the cloud, Alibaba has launched its own custom accelerator, following Amazon and Google. Facebook is in the game too and Microsoft has a significant stake in Graphcore. Intel/Mobileye have a strong lock on edge AI in cars and wireless infrastructure builders are adding AI capabilities… Read More
KLA Blows Away Competition in the Semiconductor Metrology/Inspection Market
KLA saw its share of the semiconductor metrology/inspection market increase from 52% in 2018 to 56% in 2019.
As a background, KLA manufactures and sells equipment used to monitor many of the 400 to 600 processing steps in the manufacturing of semiconductors, starting with a bare wafer, such as silicon, to a completed device. The… Read More
IBIS-AMI Back-Channel System Optimization in Practice
I recently spent some time at DesignCon 2020 in Santa Clara. For those who haven’t attended this show in a while, you need to go. It’s no longer a small event focused on chip design. It has grown into a true system-level conference, with a broad ecosystem represented on the show floor and in the technical sessions. Ecosystem is an important… Read More
The First SiFive Tech Symposiums of 2020 are Fast Approaching – We’ll be in San José, Costa Rica, and Mexico City This Month
We’re confirming seats for our first two SiFive Tech Symposiums in 2020. The first will take place in San José, Costa Rica on February 25, and the second will be in Mexico City, Mexico, on February 28. Just like our 2019 symposiums, these events are designed to engage the global hardware community in the RISC-V ecosystem, and to further… Read More
Mentor at DVCON 2020!
Are you ready for the premier conference for functional design and verification of electronic systems?
Sponsored by Accellera Systems Initiative, DVCon is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating design and verification standards required by systems, semiconductor, intellectual property (IP)… Read More
The Tech week that was February 10-14 2020
The new coronavirus outbreak or COVID-19 outbreak, as it is now officially called, continues to dominate the news again this week as currently there is no end forecast to the outbreak, and infection numbers continue to rise. This will have an impact on semiconductor supplies in the coming months and into Q2 as the necessary restrictions… Read More
Minimal Corona Impact on Chip Equipment Stocks
Very solid quarter driven by foundry/logic
AMAT reported a very solid quarter, beating the top end of guidance with foundry and logic being the primary drivers of spend. Revenues were $4.16B and EPS of $0.98 non-GAAP versus street of $4.11B and $0.93 EPS.
Guide not too wide… – $300M “Corona Cut”
More importantly,… Read More
The Future Of Embedded Monitoring – February 2020
Shall I compare thee to a…Rolls Royce jet engine?
‘There is a new era dawning whereby deeply embedded sensing within all technology will bring about great benefit for the reliability and performance of semiconductor-based products.’ These were my words during a presentation to an industry audience in China back in September… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet