The Phil Kaufman Award has been given annually since 1994 to individuals who have had a significant impact on Electronic System Design. I have attended several of the award dinners during that time. Most of the time (roughly 70%), the award recipients were either people I knew or people whose textbooks I had read. The award goes to… Read More




IEDM 2019 Press Lunch Exposed!
One of the many benefits of blogging for SemiWiki is the free conference passes and buffet lunches, absolutely. IEDM is one of the more prestigious semiconductor conferences, now in its 65th year, is being held at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco’s famed Union Square this week. This year more than 1,910 semiconductor professionals… Read More
As 2019 comes to an end everyone is starting to look at what 2020 holds
At the moment there are many encouraging signs based on the latest data. Let’s hope this trend continues into 2002 and 2020 is the year of recovery of the semiconductor market. However much depends on how the US China trade war pans out. Last week Trump blew hot and cold saying everything from the negotiations were going very well to… Read More
Bob Swan says Intel 7nm equals TSMC 5nm!
Bob Swan is really starting to grow on me. Admittedly, I am generally not a fan of CFOs taking CEO roles at semiconductor companies but thus far Bob is doing a great job. This comes from my outside-looking-in observations and from the people I know inside Intel, absolutely.
Bob did a fireside chat with Credit Suisse at their 23rd annual… Read More
Put Uber out of Our Misery
The time may have finally arrived to put app-based transportation options out of commission. The latest report of 3,000 rapes and sexual assaults committed on or by Uber drivers in 2018 highlights a serious and possibly growing shortcoming of gig-type ride-hailing and delivery services: the weakness of driver background checks… Read More
WEBINAR: Analyzing PowerMOS Devices to Reduce Power Loss and Improve Reliability
The symbol for a PowerMOS device in a converter circuit schematic looks simple enough. However, it belies a great deal of hidden complexity. A single device is actually a huge array of parallel intrinsic devices connected together to act as a single high power device. While their gate lengths are small, as with many other MOS devices,… Read More
New Generation of FPGA Based Distributed Accelerator Cards Offer High Performance and Adaptability
We have learned from nature that two characteristics are helpful for success, diversity and adaptability. The same has been shown to be true for computing systems. Things have come a long way from when CPU centric computing was the only choice. Much heavy lifting these days is done by GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs, with CPUs in a support … Read More
Rwanda is Building Africa’s Very Own Silicon Valley – Known as Kigali Innovation City (KIC)
A multi-billion dollar project inspired by America’s Silicon Valley for the production and development of technological advancement is being built in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.
This is an innovative effort, the first of its kind on the continent. The aim is to build a critical mass of talent, research and innovative… Read More
Intersection of Technologies
Monitoring brain activities and translating the signals into commands to control devices is truly a ‘Cool Idea’. Nurio is the latest winner of Protolabs’ Cool Idea award – a $250k grant towards manufacturing services to rapid prototype and accelerate the product to the market. (Click here to learn
Arm Inches Closer to Supercomputing
When it comes to Arm, we think mostly of phones and the “things” in the IoT. We know they’re in a lot of other places too, such as communications infrastructure but that’s a kind of diffuse image – “yeah, they’re everywhere”. We like easy-to-understand targets: phones, IoT devices, we get those. More recently Arm started to talk about… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption