FPGAs have always been a great way to add performance to a system. They are capable of parallel processing and have the added bonus of reprogramability. Achronix has helped boost their utility by offering on-chip embedded FPGA fabric for integration into SoCs. This has had the effect of boosting data rates through these systems… Read More




Response to IP’s Growing Impact On Yield And Reliability
One of the reasons I founded SemiWiki nine years ago was the lack of EDA, IP and Foundry content in the media. The problem is that unless you work in the industry it is very difficult to write about it in competent technical detail. Most media outlets only know what vendors tell them which is how the semiconductor industry worked before… Read More
Comparing Applied Materials with Lam Research
Lam Research (NASDAQ:LRCX) will announce its quarterly earnings on October 23, 2019, and Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT) the following month on November 14, 2019. Both companies make equipment used to manufacture semiconductor devices. While private and institutional investors often own both individual stocks, this article… Read More
Auto Architecture and the Need for Speed
Automotive makers and their suppliers are jacking up the processing power being introduced to cars along with higher speed wireless external connections. These high speed systems promise to collect, process, interpret and transmit sensor data for the purpose of enabling advanced collision avoidance and, ultimately, automated
My Top Three Reasons to Attend IEDM 2019
The International Electron Devices Meeting is a premier event to learn about the latest in semiconductor process technology. Held every year in early December is San Francisco this years conference will be held from Decembers 7th through December 11th. You can learn more about the conference at their web site here.
This is a must… Read More
Mentor’s Questa verification tools now run on 64-bit ARM based servers
The server market has been undergoing changes in the last few years. The traditional go-to for server processors had been x86 based chips from Intel or AMD. However, if you go on Amazon AWS looking for EC2 instances, you will see the “A1” instance type, which is an ARM based instance. This is not what you might think at first. The A1 instance… Read More
Accellera IP Security Standard: A Start
I mentioned some time ago (a DVCon or two ago) that Accellera had started working on a standard to quantify IP security. At the time I talked about some of the challenges in the task but nevertheless applauded the effort. You’ve got to start somewhere and some way to quantify this is better than none, as long as it doesn’t deliver misleading… Read More
Functional Safety ARC Processor IP will speed automotive system design
In the automotive space you can’t even get out of the starting gate without Functional Safety (FS). All electronic system that go into cars must have ISO 26262 certification. However, this is not something you slap on after the fact. From the ground up the requirements for ISO 26262 must be considered and the proper processes must… Read More
WEBINAR: Generating and Measuring IP Security Threat Levels For Your SoCs
IPs have an attack surface that indicates how they can be compromised in real world scenarios. Some portions of the attack surfaces are well known, others are discovered during analysis, testing or out in the field. SoCs that use large collections of IPs need a systematic and reliable way to determine the various security vulnerabilities… Read More
Webinar – AI/ML SoC Memory and Interconnect IP Perspectives
For decades development work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) was done on traditional CPUs and memory configurations. Now that we are in the “hockey stick” upturn in deployment of AI and ML, the search is on for the most efficient types of processing architectures. The result is a wave of development for… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?