If there was ever a time that ethics should be formally applied to technology, it is with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence. Yet most of the big AI companies struggle with what should seem a simple task: defining ethics for the use of their products. Without the underpinnings of a moral backbone, powerful tools often become… Read More



Siemens Shows SOC Simulation Solution for Self-Driving Vehicles
Ever since the early days of computing there has always been a large distinction between ‘regular’ computing and real time computing – where special care had to be made to deal with unordered and asynchronous events. Back then a system typically consisted of a handful of sensors and perhaps some electromechanical devices.… Read More
Opening a new front in multi faceted trade war
Synchronizing with Sunlin Chou
Sometimes we get to see, up close, leaders who make a truly enormous contribution to society. Dr. Sunlin Chou was one such leader and I was a fortunate fellow traveler. Sunlin led the exponential rise of transistors for 35 years, accelerating the waves of revolutionary digital technologies serving humanity.
Fifty years have … Read More
Selecting an ASIC Package
Semiconductor chip package technologies have evolved throughout the years to the point where hundreds of package types are available today.
Most applications will require the more general, single-element packaging for integrated circuits and the other components such as resistors, capacitators, antenna etc. However,… Read More
Off with their heads!
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
I started out as a supervisor in the wafer sort and class area. Today you’d call those probe and final test. My first boss, a man named Les Faerber who I had never met, met me in the lobby, got a smock for me, took me into the test area and introduced me to the ladies (All the operators… Read More
Tortuga Crosses a Chasm
I assume you know the Geoffrey Moore “crossing the chasm” concept, jumping from early stage enthusiasts trying your product because they’ll try anything new, to expanding to a mainstream and intrinsically more critical audience – a much tougher proposition. I’d argue there may be more than one of these transitions in the… Read More
Magillem offers a practical UPF power flow
We already know that IP-Xact is extremely useful for managing IP and SOC design specifications, yet it may come as a surprise to learn that it also can be used to form the basis of a power flow too. There are design tools that read UPF to help implement and verify designs, however it can be extremely useful to understand the interplay … Read More
JasperGold Gets Smarter, Faster and Easier for Signoff
Machine learning (ML) is already making its way into EDA tools and flows, but the majority of announcements have been around implementation, especially in guiding toward improved timing and area. This is a pretty obvious place to start; ML is in one sense an optimization technique, trained on prior examples, which should be able… Read More
56th DAC Empyrean Stepping Up ALPS with GPU Implementation
As a testament to the technology advances developed and implemented into Empyrean ALPS™ by the engineering team, the product has seen a steady growth in the adoption by users. In addition, hearing directly from the users at DAC 2018 turned out to be an all-around success for the product as well as the product team to see ALPS beating… Read More
Scaling Debug Wisdom with Bronco AI