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Functional Safety Comes to EDA and IP

Functional Safety Comes to EDA and IP
by Daniel Payne on 11-13-2019 at 10:00 am

Every week I read headlines about the progress of autonomous vehicles, and the inevitable questions began to arise, like, “Just how safe is this AV?”, or “Is this new ADAS feature trustworthy?” The automotive industry has already setup the ISO 26262 functional safety standard, and we’ve bloggedRead More


Package Reliability Issues Cost Money

Package Reliability Issues Cost Money
by Tom Dillinger on 11-13-2019 at 6:00 am

Advanced packaging technology is enabling “More Than Moore” scaling of heterogeneous technology die.  At the recent EDPS Symposium in Milpitas, Craig Hillman, Director of Product Development, DfR Solutions, at ANSYS gave a compelling presentation, “Reliability Challenges in Advanced Packaging”.  The key takeaway messages… Read More


A No-Fudge ML Architecture for Arm

A No-Fudge ML Architecture for Arm
by Bernard Murphy on 11-12-2019 at 5:00 am

Ethos applications

At TechCon I had a 1×1 with Steve Roddy, VP of product marketing in the Machine Learning (ML) Group at Arm. I wanted to learn more about their ML direction since I previously felt that, amid a sea of special ML architectures from everyone else, they were somewhat fudging their position in this space. What I heard earlier was that… Read More


Is the ASIC Business Dead?

Is the ASIC Business Dead?
by Daniel Nenni on 11-11-2019 at 10:00 am

We covered the ASIC business in Chapter 2 of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” using VLSI Technology and eSilicon as shining examples. Neither of which now exist. The ASIC business model was a critical steppingstone in the transformation of the semiconductor industry. Many systems companies… Read More


WEBINAR: Which ASIC Manufacturing Method is Right for You?

WEBINAR: Which ASIC Manufacturing Method is Right for You?
by Daniel Nenni on 11-11-2019 at 6:00 am

Minimizing ASIC production costs is the goal of every company. The problem is that this requires extensive knowledge. You must understand the technical intricacies and the financial implications of multiple activities like wafer production, packaging and QA activities such as electrical tests.

Generally, the more your company… Read More


Google Gaining ADAS Ground

Google Gaining ADAS Ground
by Roger C. Lanctot on 11-10-2019 at 6:00 am

Google’s Head of Android Auto Partnerships, Jens Bussman, joined me on stage last week in Munich at TU-Auto Europe to discuss Google’s progress and priorities in the global connected car market. The standing-room-only audience was treated to an overview of Google’s plans and some clarifications regarding its different assets… Read More


The New SemiWiki Job Board!

The New SemiWiki Job Board!
by Daniel Nenni on 11-09-2019 at 6:00 am

As a very experienced semiconductor job seeker/employer the most important lesson I have learned in 35 years is that getting the first interview is not so much WHAT you know as WHO you know. Networking really is the key to career success and SemiWiki 2.0 is all about networking, absolutely.

In fact, that is one of the reasons why I became… Read More


Mentor Adds Circuit Simulators to the Cloud using Azure

Mentor Adds Circuit Simulators to the Cloud using Azure
by Daniel Payne on 11-08-2019 at 6:00 am

Mentor and Azure

Most EDA tools started out running on mainframe computers, then minicomputers, followed by workstations and finally desktop PCs running Linux. If your SoC design team is working on a big chip with over a billion transistors, then your company likely will use a compute farm to distribute some of the more demanding IC jobs over lots… Read More


Webinar – 3D NAND Memory Cell Optimization

Webinar – 3D NAND Memory Cell Optimization
by admin on 11-07-2019 at 10:00 am

Flash memory has become ubiquitous, so much so that it is easy to forget what life before it was like. Large scale non-volatile storage was limited spinning disks, which were bulky, power hungry and unreliable. With NAND Flash, we have become used to carrying many gigabytes around with us all the time in the form of cell phones, USB… Read More


Rapid growth of AI/ML based systems requires memory and interconnect IP

Rapid growth of AI/ML based systems requires memory and interconnect IP
by admin on 11-07-2019 at 6:00 am

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are working their way into a surprising number of areas. Probably the one you think of first is autonomous driving, but we are seeing a rapidly growing number of other applications as time goes on. Among these are networking, sensor fusion, manufacturing, data mining, numerical… Read More