The rising complexity of modern SoC designs, as enabled by progressing manufacturing technology, leads to an increasing validation challenge as the only way to manage complexity increase is by re-using more pre-designed IP blocks. These IP-blocks are provided by various suppliers such as a foundry partner, internal design… Read More
WEBINAR: Is Agentic AI the Future of EDA?The semiconductor industry is entering a transformative era,…Read MoreTexas Instruments and the TTL Wars
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
Most people in the IC business understand very well that TTL products dominated our industry for 30 years or so. They’ll also probably know that TI was the king of TTL. But, if you ask those people what TTL is, most won’t have any idea. If you’re one of those people, rest easy. … Read More
Banks and ATMs Under Cyber Attack
The Silence hacking crew, mostly attributed to a group of very crafty Russian hackers, has struck again pulling-in over $3 million in cash from ATMs.
At least 3 banks have been attacked in the latest campaign, with Dutch Bangla Bank being the largest. The criminal hackers first compromised the bank’s card management infrastructure… Read More
Chapter 1 – Predicting Trends in the Semiconductor Industry
Figure 1 is the most basic of all the predictable parameters of the semiconductor industry, even more so than Moore’s Law. It is the learning curve for the transistor. Since 1954, the revenue per transistor (and presumably the cost per transistor, if we had the data from the manufacturers) has followed a highly predictable learning… Read More
Where Have You Gone, Lee Iacocca
The automotive industry is a funny business. It is simultaneously ruled by ego driven “visionaries” and penny-pinching bean counters. (Don’t believe me? Just ask Bob Lutz.) This id-superego tension plays out in business section headlines every day most recently including the death of FCA’s Sergio… Read More
Jump-Starting Full-Stack AI
In the semiconductor world when we hear “full-stack” we think of a chip, chipset or board with a bunch of software, which can be connected to sensors of various types on one end, trained networks in the middle and actuators on the other side. But of course that’s not really a full-stack. The real thing would be deployment of an entire… Read More
#56DAC Update – What’s New at Concept Engineering
I first connected with Gerhard Angst of Concept Engineering over 15 years ago, because I was using their SpiceVision PRO tool to visual SPICE netlists received from customer designs to be debugged in a FastSPICE circuit simulator. The ability to visualize a transistor-level netlist was simply essential to quickly understanding… Read More
An Important Next Step for Portable Stimulus Adoption
Portable stimulus has been a hot topic for a couple of years in the EDA and semiconductor industries. Many observers see this approach as the next major advance in verification beyond the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), and the next step higher in abstraction for specifying verification intent. The basic idea is to … Read More
An AI Accelerator Ecosystem For High-Level Synthesis
AI accelerators as engines for object or speech recognition (among many possibilities), are becoming increasingly popular for inference in mobile and power-constrained applications. Today much of this inferencing runs largely in software on CPUs or GPUs thanks to the sheer size of the smartphone market, but that will shift… Read More
Two Fun Things To Do at SEMICON West on July 9, 2019
I will be at SEMICON / EE Design West on Tuesday, July 9, 2019, and so should you!
Quantum computing will be a hot topic at SEMICON West and on Tuesday, July 9, the IBM Quantum Computer will be on display at the Smart Design Pavilion in the South Hall (Moscone Center) from 10:00am to 5:00pm. It looks like no other computer I have ever… Read More




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