Having worked at several semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) companies, I know how important it is to have a strong design data management platform for tracking the development and distribution of SIP products. Everyone doing semiconductor design should care about design data management. But for an IP company, it is … Read More



Semicon West 2019 – Day 3 – Global Foundries
On Wednesday, July 10th I got to sit down with Gary Patton, CTO and SVP of worldwide research and development of Global Foundries and get an update on how the company is doing.
We started with a discussion of Global Foundries (GF) general business health. Revenue for the year is expected to be around $6 billion dollars. They are focused… Read More
Mentor Highlights HLS Customer Use in Automotive Applications
I’ve talked before about Mentor’s work in high-level synthesis (HLS) and machine learning (ML). An important advantage of HLS in these applications is its ability to very quickly adapt and optimize architecture and verify an implementation to an objective in a highly dynamic domain. Design for automotive applications – for … Read More
Virtuoso Adapts to Address Cyber Physical Systems
LIDAR is a controversial topic, with even Elon Musk weighing in on whether it will ever be feasible for use in self driving cars. His contention is that the sensors will remain too expensive and potentially be unreliable because of their mechanical complexity. However, each of the sensors available for autonomous driving have … Read More
IP Lifecycle Management and Permissions
My first professional experience with computers and file permissions was at Intel in the late 1970s, where we used big iron IBM mainframes located far away in another state, and each user could edit their own files along with browse shared files from co-workers in the same department. I saw this same file permission concept when … Read More
Real Men Have Fabs Jerry Sanders, TJ Rodgers, and AMD
In 1977 I made a job change: I took a job at Raytheon Semiconductor. Raytheon was on Ellis Street next door to the Fairchild “Rust Bucket”. In the early days, they shared the same parking lot so my commute didn’t change much, but my outlook on life changed a bunch. I had mostly enjoyed my days at Fairchild, but I hated every single … Read More
Taking the Pain out of UVM
If you are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the many ways you can leverage the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), Breker Verification Systems has gone to a lot of effort to put that information at your fingertips.
A technical subcommittee of Accellera voted to establish the UVM in December 2009. UVM was based… Read More
SiFive Fosters RISC-V Collaboration and Education in India and Bangladesh Via Symposiums, Tutorials and Workshops
Last year we hosted several SiFive Tech Symposiums in India to help promulgate the RISC-V ecosystem in the region. The enthusiastic reception from those in industry as well as students and faculty at India’s most esteemed universities was inspiring. This July and August, we’re bringing the SiFive Tech Symposium back to India,… Read More
SemiWiki Webinar Series: Who Wants to do a Webinar?
Webinars have been a popular form of communication since even before SemiWiki existed and they are a mainstay in today’s fast-moving semiconductor ecosystem.
In the past, SemiWiki has assisted with more than a hundred webinars. Today SemiWiki can do a complete webinar from start to finish using the GotoWebinar software. SemiWiki… Read More
Chapter 3 – Moore’s Law is Unconstitutional!
(Adapted from a presentation first given under this title in 1989 and subsequently expanded in presentations over a period of nearly thirty years)
In 1965, Gordon Moore, then R&D Manager for Fairchild Semiconductor, published a paper in “Electronics” magazine predicting the trend for semiconductors in the next ten years. … Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?