At the ES Design West event in San Francisco last week Silvaco’s CTO and EVP of Products, Babak Taheri, gave a presentation titled, “Next Generation SoC Design: From Atoms to Systems”. The time slot for the talk was only 30-minutes which is simply not enough to discuss all the technology Silvaco is providing now. I had not looked closely… Read More




Semicon West was sluggish with hopes of 2020 recovery
Bouncing along a not too bad bottom
Given that we have followed the semiconductor industry through many down cycles, we can safely say that this one isn’t all that bad by comparison. Everyone, big & small, is still safely profitable and in relatively good shape. Though we are seeing the normal week long holiday shut downs
WEBINAR: Eliminating Hybrid Verification Barriers Through Test Suite Synthesis
I’ve been following the evolution of the verification space for a very long time including several stints consulting to formal verification companies. It has always been interesting to me to see how so many diverse verification techniques emerge and been used, but without much unification of the approaches. With the emergence… Read More
Safety Methods Meet Enterprise SSDs
The use of safety-centric logic design techniques for automotive applications is now widely appreciated, but did you know that similar methods are gaining traction in the design of enterprise-level SSD controllers? In the never-ending optimization of datacenters, a lot attention is being paid to smart storage, offloading… Read More
SEMICON West 2019 – Day 1 – Imec
On Monday, July 8th Imec held a technology forum ahead of Semicon West. I saw the papers presented and interviewed three of the authors. The following is a summary of what I feel are the keys points of their research.
Arnaud Furnemont
Arnaud Furnemont’s talk was titled “From Technology Scaling to System Optimization”. Simple 2D … Read More
The Wilf Corrigan Fairchild P&L Review
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
In 1973 plus or minus a year or so I was working as a supervising engineer in one of the bipolar digital product groups. My boss was a man named Jerry Secrest. He was a great boss – he taught me most of what I knew about ICs in my youth. Jerry had responsibility for a product line. That… Read More
AI Chip Landscape and Observations
It’s been more than two years since I started the AI chip list. We saw a lot of news about AI chips from tech giants, IC/IP vendors and a huge number of startups. Now I have a new “AI Chip Landscape” infographic and dozens of AI chip related articles (in Chinses, sorry about that :p).
At this moment, I’d like… Read More
Are the 100 Most Promising AI Start-ups Prototyping?
I came across a report on the 100 most promising AI start-ups. The report claimed that CBInsights had “selected the 100 most promising AI start-ups from a pool of 3K+ companies based on several factors …” Wait, what … 3K+ companies!?!? This was a stunning reminder of the sheer magnitude of what is shaping up to be a veritable tsunami… Read More
The Coming Tsunami in Multi-chip Packaging
The pace of Moore’s Law scaling for monolithic integrated circuit density has abated, due to a combination of fundamental technical challenges and financial considerations. Yet, from an architectural perspective, the diversity in end product requirements continues to grow. New heterogeneous processing units are being… Read More
HBM or CDM ESD Verification – You Need Both
In the realm of ESD protection, Charged Device Model (CDM) is becoming the biggest challenge. Of course, Human Body Model (HBM) is still essential, and needs to be used when verifying chips. However, a number of factors are raising the potential losses that CDM events can cause relative to HBM. These factors fall into two categories:… Read More
Intel Foundry is a Low Risk Aternative to TSMC