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Jump-Starting Full-Stack AI

Jump-Starting Full-Stack AI
by Bernard Murphy on 07-03-2019 at 5:00 am

In the semiconductor world when we hear “full-stack” we think of a chip, chipset or board with a bunch of software, which can be connected to sensors of various types on one end, trained networks in the middle and actuators on the other side. But of course that’s not really a full-stack. The real thing would be deployment of an entire… Read More


#56DAC Update – What’s New at Concept Engineering

#56DAC Update – What’s New at Concept Engineering
by Daniel Payne on 07-02-2019 at 10:00 am

Concept Engineering, DAC56

I first connected with Gerhard Angst of Concept Engineering over 15 years ago, because I was using their SpiceVision PRO tool to visual SPICE netlists received from customer designs to be debugged in a FastSPICE circuit simulator. The ability to visualize a transistor-level netlist was simply essential to quickly understanding… Read More


An Important Next Step for Portable Stimulus Adoption

An Important Next Step for Portable Stimulus Adoption
by Daniel Nenni on 07-02-2019 at 5:00 am

Portable stimulus has been a hot topic for a couple of years in the EDA and semiconductor industries. Many observers see this approach as the next major advance in verification beyond the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), and the next step higher in abstraction for specifying verification intent. The basic idea is to … Read More


An AI Accelerator Ecosystem For High-Level Synthesis

An AI Accelerator Ecosystem For High-Level Synthesis
by Bernard Murphy on 07-01-2019 at 10:00 am

AI accelerators as engines for object or speech recognition (among many possibilities), are becoming increasingly popular for inference in mobile and power-constrained applications. Today much of this inferencing runs largely in software on CPUs or GPUs thanks to the sheer size of the smartphone market, but that will shift… Read More


Two Fun Things To Do at SEMICON West on July 9, 2019

Two Fun Things To Do at SEMICON West on July 9, 2019
by Randy Smith on 07-01-2019 at 10:00 am

 

I will be at SEMICON / EE Design West on Tuesday, July 9, 2019, and so should you!

Quantum computing will be a hot topic at SEMICON West and on Tuesday, July 9, the IBM Quantum Computer will be on display at the Smart Design Pavilion in the South Hall (Moscone Center) from 10:00am to 5:00pm. It looks like no other computer I have ever… Read More


Layoffs à la Fairchild

Layoffs à la Fairchild
by John East on 07-01-2019 at 5:00 am

The “20 Questions with John East” series continues

You wouldn’t think that layoffs would be a subject that I’d want to talk about in my stories of  “Silicon Valley the Way I saw it.”  The subject is just plain distasteful!!  — Still  — layoffs were a major part of the valley’s culture back in the day.  To give a true picture… Read More


2019 GSA Silicon Summit and SiFive

2019 GSA Silicon Summit and SiFive
by Daniel Nenni on 06-28-2019 at 8:00 am

Naveed Sherwani, President and CEO of SiFive, did the keynote for this year’s Silicon Summit. This is one of the premier events for the C level executives in Silicon Valley, absolutely. Naveed is one of the top visionaries for the semiconductor industry and he certainly did not disappoint this time or any other time in my experience.… Read More


Double-digit semiconductor decline in 2019

Double-digit semiconductor decline in 2019
by Bill Jewell on 06-27-2019 at 4:00 pm

The global semiconductor market is headed for a double-digit decline for the year 2019 after a decline of 15.6% in first quarter 2019 from fourth quarter 2018. According to WSTS (World Semiconductor Trade Statistics) data, this was the largest quarter-to-quarter decline since a 16.3% decline in first quarter 2009, ten years … Read More


SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference – Imec design papers

SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference – Imec design papers
by Scotten Jones on 06-27-2019 at 10:00 am

At the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference Imec presented several design papers and I have had the opportunity to review the papers and speak with the authors. In this summary I am going to address three emerging areas in order of when I think they may be implemented from soonest to latest.

Specifically, I will discuss:

  1. Buried Power
Read More

Integrated SIMs Will Unlock IoT Growth

Integrated SIMs Will Unlock IoT Growth
by Bernard Murphy on 06-27-2019 at 5:00 am

I’m a believer that connectivity for the IoT at scale (the trillions of devices that the industry predicts) has to be cellular. This is partly based on reach, particularly outside urban areas, but is mostly based on the financial implications of that scale. Yes, you can build infrastructure for say local Wi-Fi support with backhaul… Read More