The electronics industry strives to continuously introduce new product innovation and differentiation. The ASIC market arose from the motivation to offer unique (cost-reduced) integration that was not realizable with commodity MSI/LSI parts. The SoC market evolved to provide even greater differentiation, integrating… Read More




The Implications of the Rise of AI/ML in the Cloud
Recently, Daniel Nenni blogged on the presentation Wally Rhines gave at #56th DAC. Daniel provided a great summary, but I want to dive into a portion of the presentation in more detail. I love Wally’s presentations, but sometimes you cannot absorb the wealth of information he provides when you initially see it. It’s… Read More
#56thDAC SerDes, Analog and RISC-V sessions
The good news is that the next five DAC events will take place in Moscone Center in San Francisco! If going to Las Vegas from the Bay area is an easy trip, coming from Europe to Las Vegas makes it a 24+hours journey… One obvious consequence was the poor attendance to the exhibition floor. But let’s be positive and notice that the number… Read More
TSMC in the Cloud Update #56thDAC 2019
During my Taiwan visit, prior to Las Vegas, I was fortunate to spend time with Willy Chen and Vivian Jiang to prepare for the cloud panel I moderated at #56thDAC. Willy and Vivian are part of the ever-important Design Infrastructure Marketing Division of TSMC, which includes the internal and external cloud efforts. TSMC first announced… Read More
SpaceX: Starlink to Carlink
When SpaceX launched 60 satellites into orbit last month – the first of a planned fleet of 12,000 such satellites which will ultimately deliver terrestrial Internet access in concert with earth-bound stations – astronomers were alarmed at the apparent impact on earth-based observatories from light pollution.… Read More
#56DAC – What’s New with Custom Design Platform
TSMC attends DAC every year and they do something very savvy, it’s a theatre where they invite all of their EDA and IP partners to present something of interest, followed by a drawing for a prize. At the end of the day they even have a nice prize, like a MacBook Air, which I didn’t win. On Wednesday I watched Dave Reed of Synopsys… Read More
Intelligence in the Fog
By now, you should know about AI in the cloud for natural language processing, image ID, recommendation, etc, etc (thanks to Google, Facebook, AWS, Baidu and several others) and AI on the edge for collision avoidance, lane-keeping, voice recognition and many other applications. But did you know about AI in the fog? First, a credit… Read More
The Complexity of Block-Level Placement @ 56thDAC
The recent Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas was an indication of how the electronics industry is evolving. In its formative years, DAC was focused on the fundamental algorithms emerging from academic research and industrial R&D, that enabled the continuation of the Moore’s Law complexity curve. (Indeed, the… Read More
Wally Rhines Keynote @ #56thDAC!
One of the perks of blogging on SemiWiki is the events you get to attend for FREE and the amazing people you get to meet and Wally Rhines is certainly one of those people. You will not find a more intelligent, innovative, and genuinely nice group of people in my experience. Having traveled the world meeting thousands of people I can tell… Read More
The RISC-V Revolution is Sweeping Across the APAC Region and Australia
Join SiFive Tech Symposiums in Tokyo, Daejeon, Pangyo, Hsinchu, Singapore and Sydney
As we make our way around the world meeting and engaging with others in the semiconductor and hardware design community, we are seeing an increased interest in RISC-V based hardware innovation. This is due in large part to the emergence of market-ready… Read More
Intel Foundry is a Low Risk Aternative to TSMC