Semiconductor industry evolution was largely a U.S. phenomenon. While there were important contributions made by persons all over the world, the basic technology grew from the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs which was licensed broadly in the U.S. That created a level playing field for all who wanted to become producers. … Read More
WEBINAR: Is Agentic AI the Future of EDA?The semiconductor industry is entering a transformative era,…Read MoreIs Samsung having problems with 7NM? Do long lines at TSMC prove that?
Reports of increasing TSMC 7NM lead times
There have been a number of increasing media reports about lengthening leads times for TSMC 7NM process. From what we have been able to determine its not due to TSMC having a yield bust or other production issues, it is simply one of stronger than expected demand.
There have been reports of … Read More
Speeding Up Physical Failure Analysis (PFA)
The cost of an IC depends on many factors like: NRE, masks, fabrication, testing, packaging. Product engineers are tasked with testing each part and understanding what exactly is limiting the yields. Every company has a methodology for Physical Failure Analysis (PFA), and the challenge is to make this process as quick as possible,… Read More
WEBINAR: AI-Powered Automated Timing Arc Prediction for AMS IP’s
A directed approach to reduce Risk and improve Quality
Safety and reliability are critical for most applications of integrated circuits (ICs) today. Even more so when they serve markets like ADAS, autonomous driving, healthcare and aeronautics where they are paramount. Safety and reliability transcend all levels of an integrated… Read More
The Korea/Japan trade war benefits US more than US/China hurts US
Glasses and Open Architecture for Computer Vision
You know that AI can now look at an image and detect significant objects like a pedestrian or a nearby car. But had you thought about a need for corrective lenses or other vision aids? Does AI vision decay over time, like ours, so that it needs increasing help to read prescription labels and identify road signs at a distance?
In fact no.… Read More
Learn About Implementing SmartNICs, an Achronix White Paper
We have all seen the announcements to provide ever-increasing network capabilities within the data centers. Enabling these advances are improvements in connectivity including SerDes, PAM4, optical solutions, and many others. It seems 40G is old news now, and the current push is for 400G – things are changing very quickly.… Read More
Major Drone Attack Against Global Oil Production Showcases Weak Cybersecurity Thinking
Drones attacked an oil processing facility last week and shut down half of all Saudi capacity, representing about 5% of the world’s daily oil production. We have seen how a botnet of compromised home appliances can take down a sizeable chunk of the internet, control structures of electricity and other critical infrastructures… Read More
Automatic Documentation Generation for RTL Design and Verification
Ask any hardware or software engineer working on a product, and they will tell you that writing documentation is a pain. Customers have high expectations for user manuals and reference guides, usually requiring a team of technical writers to satisfy their requirements. In order to meet time-to-market deadlines, documentation… Read More
More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel
The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel. We had a really complex process! But —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx. TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology. We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More




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