The New Yorks Times’ “The Privacy Project” highlights all that is terrifying about our surveillance economy. We blithely throw away our privacy for the privilege of freely accessing mountains of information about the things we want to buy, the celebrities and teams we follow or support, or to get directions
WEBINAR: Is Agentic AI the Future of EDA?The semiconductor industry is entering a transformative era,…Read MoreBringing Hierarchy to DFT
Hierarchy is nearly universally used in the SoC design process to help manage complexity. Dealing with flat logical or physical designs proved unworkable decades ago. However, there were a few places in the flow where flat tools continued to be used. Mentor lead the pack in the years around 1999 in helping the industry move from … Read More
WEBINAR: Prototyping With Intel’s New 80M Gate FPGA
The next generation FPGAs have been announced, and they are BIG! Intel is shipping its Stratix 10 GX 10M FPGA, and Xilinx has announced its VU19P FPGA for general availability in the Fall of next year. The former is expected to support about 80M ASIC gates, and the latter about 50M ASIC gates. And, to bring this mind-boggling gate… Read More
How Good is Your Testbench?
I’ve always been intrigued by Synopsys’ Certitude technology. It’s a novel approach to the eternal problem of how to get better coverage in verification. For a design of any reasonable complexity, the state-space you would have to cover to exhaustively consider all possible behaviors is vastly larger than you could ever possibly… Read More
Advanced CMOS Technology 2020 (The 10/7/5 NM Nodes)
Our friends at Threshold Systems have a new class that may be of interest to you. It’s an updated version of the Advanced CMOS Technology class held last May. As part of the previous class we did a five part series on The Evolution of the Extension Implant which you can see on the Threshold Systems SemiWiki landing page HERE. And… Read More
The Tech Week that was January 20-24 2020
Happy Chinese New Year. Let’s hope the Year of the Rat brings a recovery for the semiconductor industry. The initial signs are all good with many positive indications in the news this week, but let’s hope the Wuhan coronavirus doesn’t derail the recovery by becoming a global emergency. To all those based in China stay safe … Read More
Specialized Accelerators Needed for Cloud Based ML Training
The use of machine learning (ML) to solve complex problems that could not previously be addressed by traditional computing is expanding at an accelerating rate. Even with advances in neural network design, ML’s efficiency and accuracy are highly dependent on the training process. The methods used for training evolved from CPU… Read More
FPGAs in the 5G Era!
FPGAs, today and throughout the history of semiconductors, play a critical role in design enablement and electronic systems. Which is why we included the history of FPGAs in our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” and added a new chapter in the 2019 edition on the history of Achronix.
In a recent blog… Read More
Tesla is Teaching Us to Move Over
Believe it or not, Tesla Motors is teaching us to be better drivers. One of the most remarkable lessons we are learning is that motor vehicles on public roadways ought to stay away from emergency and other service vehicles. In the U.S., we can all expect to hear more about “Move Over” laws – now enacted in all 50 states.
It sometimes … Read More
Woven City: Smashing Toyota’s Looms
Car companies are interesting creatures in a corporate world increasingly dominated by Internet-centric behemoths from Silicon Valley, Seattle, and China. While the denizens of the Internet have demonstrated their ability to create billions of dollars in shareholder value from the whims and whimsy of browsing consumers,




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