Think because your new car is loaded with ADAS your insurance company should give you a break on premiums? Think again. The purpose of all those fancy features is to reduce the risk of an accident or damage to your car, either of which could be costly to your insurance company and quite possibly to you also. If you’re paying extra for … Read More



The China trade issue is back with a vengeance!
Watching the boats go by in Shanghai-
As I write this note I happen to be looking out my hotel window over the Bund onto the brightly lit party boats cruising the Huangpu river that meanders through Shanghai. All is well here in China and the parties on the boats with millions of LEDs go on……
The view from China is that the… Read More
Adding CDM Protection to a Real World LNA Test Case
In RF designs Low Noise Amplifiers (LNA) play a critical role in system operation. They simultaneously need to be extremely sensitive and noise free, yet also must be able to withstand strong signal input without distortion. LNA designers often struggle to meet device performance specifications. Their task is further complicated… Read More
eFPGA – What a great idea! But I have no idea how I’d use it!
eFPGA stands for embedded Field Programmable Grid Arrays. An eFPGA is a programmable device like an FPGA but rather than being sold as a completed chip it is licensed as a semiconductor IP block. ASIC designers can license this IP and embed it into their own chips adding the flexibility of programmability at an incremental cost.… Read More
Intel, Motorola, and the IBM PC
Wikipedia … “In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a non-linear system can result in large differences in a later state”. In other words, a butterfly bats its wings in Argentina and the path of an immense tornado in Oklahoma is changed some… Read More
Chapter 4 – Gompertz Predicts the Future
In 1825, Benjamin Gompertz proposed a mathematical model for time series that looks like an “S-curve”.1 Mathematically it is a double exponential (Figure 1) where y=a(exp(b(exp(-ct)))) where t is time and a, b and c are adjustable coefficients that modulate the steepness of the S-Curve. The Gompertz Curve has been used for a … Read More
Lam beats reduced guide as 2019 is done and 2020 is just a hope!
Nice house in a neighborhood in decline
Lam posted EPS and revenues ahead of reduced expectations, but guided the current quarter below street current estimates.
Is a “beat” really a “beat” if its against greatly reduced numbers? We would remind investors that we are looking at EPS cut more or less in … Read More
GPU-Powered SPICE – Understanding the Cost
To deploy a GPU-based SPICE solution, you need to understand the costs involved. To get your hands on this new report analyzing this specific issue, all you need to do is attend Empyrean’s upcoming webinar, “GPU-Powered SPICE: The Way Forward for Analog Simulation,” which will be held on Thursday, August 8, 2019, at 10:00 am (PDT).… Read More
Arm Gets More Creative with Licensing
Without a doubt, RISC-V is generating a lot of buzz and I’m sure a lot of new designs, especially in spaces that are super-cost competitive or demand added differentiation in the processor. I doubt this is having meaningful impact on Arm business, in $$ rather than press. It takes a long time to replace an ecosystem of that size and … Read More
56th DAC – In Depth Look at Analog IP Migration from MunEDA
Every year at DAC, in addition to the hubbub of the exhibit floor and the relatively short technical sessions, there are a number of tutorials that dive in depth into interesting topics. At the 56th DAC in Las Vegas this year, MunEDA offered an interesting tutorial on Analog IP migration and optimization. This is a key issue for large… Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?