Arguably the cloud was the quickest road to riches for chip designers large and small. As an emerging company, if you wanted to raise money just put “Datacenter” in your pitch deck and you were assured millions. You would be competing with semiconductor’s version of David and Goliath (AMD and Intel) but that was a good thing, right?… Read More





Webinar Recap: IP Security Threats in your SoC
Three years ago my youngest son purchased a $17 smart watch on eBay, but then my oldest son read an article warning about how that watch would sync with your phone, then send all of your contact info to an address in China. My youngest son then wisely turned the watch off, and never used it again. Hackers have been able to spoof and hide … Read More
GM’s CES No Show: EmBARRAssing!
After failing in 2017 and 2018 to put a single woman on-stage to deliver a high profile keynote, the Consumer Technology Association featured four female keynoters in 2019. Until recently, two women were on the docket for the 2020 show in January, but news arrived last week that General Motors’ CEO Mary Barra had cancelled… Read More
Webinar Recap: Challenges of Autonomous Vehicle Validation
Autonomous vehicle progress is in the daily news, so it’s quite exciting to watch it develop with the help of SoC design, sensors, actuators and software from engineering teams spanning the entire globe. Tesla vehicles have reached Level 2 autonomy, Audi e-tron is at Level 3, and Waymo nearly at Level 5 with robot taxis being… Read More
MEMS Actuation and the Art of Prototyping
I mentioned a while back that I’m really getting into the role that sensors play in our new hyper-connected world – in the IoT, intelligent cars, homes, cities, industry, utilities, medicine, agriculture, etc, etc. If we can think of a way to sense it and connect it, someone is probably already doing it. But there’s more to … Read More
Mentor unpacks LVS and LVL issues around advanced packaging
Innovations in packaging have played an important role in improving system performance and area utilization. Advances like 2.5D interposers and fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP) have allowed mixed dies to be used in a single package and have dramatically reduced the number of connections that need to go all the way to the… Read More
Where has the ASIC Business Gone?
As the traditional ASIC business disappears before our eyes with the recent divestitures and acquisitions, I have been asking questions amongst the fabless semiconductor ecosystem and am getting few answers.
Who or what is going to step in to enable start-ups and new to silicon systems companies with application specific chips?… Read More
Could TSMC’s spend be part of the seasonal pattern?
Is there more downside than upside in stocks?
Entering a seasonally weak period, then what?
Does China trade come back to haunt industry?
Cycle is past the bottom-But what kind of up cycle?
The most recent up cycle in the industry was a huge one, driven by a huge spend on NAND as SSD’s sucked up infinite number of devices. DRAM … Read More
Top Three Reasons to Attend the Synopsys Fusion Compiler Event!
As a professional semiconductor event attendee I can pretty much tell if an event will be successful by looking at the agenda. What I look for is simple, customer presentations. Not company presentations or partner presentations but actual customer case studies presented by name brand companies. For this event Google, Intel,… Read More
U.S.-China trade war continues
The trade dispute between the U.S. and China continues to drag on. According to Reuters, U.S. President Donald Trump recently threatened to raise tariffs further on Chinese imports if no deal is reached. Tariffs affecting most consumer electronics imports from China are scheduled to go into effect on December 15, according to… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption