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Safety Methods Meet Enterprise SSDs

Safety Methods Meet Enterprise SSDs
by Bernard Murphy on 07-16-2019 at 5:00 am

The use of safety-centric logic design techniques for automotive applications is now widely appreciated, but did you know that similar methods are gaining traction in the design of enterprise-level SSD controllers? In the never-ending optimization of datacenters, a lot attention is being paid to smart storage, offloading… Read More


SEMICON West 2019 – Day 1 – Imec

SEMICON West 2019 – Day 1 – Imec
by Scotten Jones on 07-15-2019 at 10:00 am

On Monday, July 8th Imec held a technology forum ahead of Semicon West. I saw the papers presented and interviewed three of the authors. The following is a summary of what I feel are the keys points of their research.

Arnaud Furnemont
Arnaud Furnemont’s talk was titled “From Technology Scaling to System Optimization”. Simple 2D … Read More


The Wilf Corrigan Fairchild P&L Review

The Wilf Corrigan Fairchild P&L Review
by John East on 07-15-2019 at 6:00 am

The “20 Questions with John East” series continues

In 1973 plus or minus a year or so I was working as a supervising engineer in one of the bipolar digital product groups.  My boss was a man named Jerry Secrest.  He was a great boss – he taught me most of what I knew about ICs in my youth. Jerry had responsibility for a product line.  That… Read More


Are the 100 Most Promising AI Start-ups Prototyping?

Are the 100 Most Promising AI Start-ups Prototyping?
by Daniel Nenni on 07-12-2019 at 10:00 am

I came across a report on the 100 most promising AI start-ups. The report claimed that CBInsights had “selected the 100 most promising AI start-ups from a pool of 3K+ companies based on several factors …”  Wait, what … 3K+ companies!?!?  This was a stunning reminder of the sheer magnitude of what is shaping up to be a veritable tsunami… Read More


The Coming Tsunami in Multi-chip Packaging

The Coming Tsunami in Multi-chip Packaging
by Tom Dillinger on 07-12-2019 at 6:00 am

The pace of Moore’s Law scaling for monolithic integrated circuit density has abated, due to a combination of fundamental technical challenges and financial considerations.  Yet, from an architectural perspective, the diversity in end product requirements continues to grow.  New heterogeneous processing units are being… Read More


HBM or CDM ESD Verification – You Need Both

HBM or CDM ESD Verification – You Need Both
by Tom Simon on 07-11-2019 at 11:00 am

In the realm of ESD protection, Charged Device Model (CDM) is becoming the biggest challenge. Of course, Human Body Model (HBM) is still essential, and needs to be used when verifying chips. However, a number of factors are raising the potential losses that CDM events can cause relative to HBM. These factors fall into two categories:… Read More


Konica Minolta Talks About High-Level Synthesis using C++

Konica Minolta Talks About High-Level Synthesis using C++
by Daniel Payne on 07-11-2019 at 8:00 am

Konica Minolta printer

In the early days of chip design circa 1970’s the engineers would write logic equations, then manually reduce that logic using Karnaugh Maps. Next, we had the first generation of logic synthesis in the early 1980’s, which read in a gate-level netlist, performed logic reduction, then output a smaller gate-level netlist.… Read More


WEBINAR: GPU-Powered SPICE – The Way Forward for Analog Simulation

WEBINAR: GPU-Powered SPICE – The Way Forward for Analog Simulation
by Randy Smith on 07-10-2019 at 9:37 am

Several years ago, I was a consultant to a company called Gauda, Inc.  I enjoyed working with Gauda as the technology was interesting. On June 3, 2014, Gauda, Inc. was acquired by D2S, Inc. so their technology lives on. Gauda was focused on optical proximity correction (OPC) and optical proximity verification solutions utilizing… Read More


Smart Hearing is Heating Up

Smart Hearing is Heating Up
by Bernard Murphy on 07-10-2019 at 6:00 am

A lot of the attention in intelligent systems is on object detection in still or video images but there’s another very active area, in smart audio. Amazon and Google smart speakers may be the best-known applications but there are more obvious (and perhaps less novelty-driven) applications in enhancing the hearing devices we already… Read More