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Emulation Evaluation for the Ages!

Emulation Evaluation for the Ages!
by Daniel Nenni on 12-24-2018 at 7:00 am

One of the more entertaining things I get to observe in the semiconductor ecosystem is competitive customer evaluations of tools and IP. Seriously, this is where the rubber meets the road no matter what the press releases say.

This time it was emulators which is one of the most interesting EDA market segments since there is no dominant… Read More


CAPEX Cuts and Microns Memory Markdown

CAPEX Cuts and Microns Memory Markdown
by Robert Maire on 12-21-2018 at 7:00 am

For those who have been paying any attention to the semiconductor industry its no surprise that memory demand and therefore pricing is down from its peak earlier in the year. Its not getting better any time fast.

After several strong years of demand and pricing, which was followed by enormous CAPEX spending we are seeing the standard… Read More


Synopsys Offers Smooth Sailing for OTP NVM

Synopsys Offers Smooth Sailing for OTP NVM
by Tom Simon on 12-20-2018 at 12:00 pm

Nobody likes drama. Wait, let me narrow that down a bit. Chip designers really hate drama. They live in a world of risk and uncertainty, a world that tool and IP vendors spend considerable resources trying to make safer and more rational. It’s notable just how ironic that Sidense and Kilopass were duking out patent litigation in the… Read More


AI at the Edge

AI at the Edge
by Tom Dillinger on 12-20-2018 at 7:00 am

Frequent Semiwiki readers are well aware of the industry momentum behind machine learning applications. New opportunities are emerging at a rapid pace. High-level programming language semantics and compilers to capture and simulate neural network models have been developed to enhance developer productivity (link). Researchers… Read More


DAC versus SEMICON ES Design West!

DAC versus SEMICON ES Design West!
by Daniel Nenni on 12-19-2018 at 12:00 pm

As I mentioned in a previous post, the big drama at last year’s Design Automation Conference was the acquisition of the Electronic Systems Design Alliance (formerly EDAC) by SEMI, the owner of the SEMICON West Conference franchise. The plan is to add an ES Design West wing to the SEMICON West conference in San Francisco next year.… Read More


Ampere: More on Arm-Based Servers

Ampere: More on Arm-Based Servers
by Bernard Murphy on 12-19-2018 at 7:00 am

Since I talked recently about AWS adding access to Arm-based server instances in their cloud offering, I thought it would be interesting to look further into other Arm-based server solutions. I had a meeting with Ampere Computing at Arm TechCon. They offer server devices and are worth closer examination as a player in this game.… Read More


SoC Design Partitioning to Save Time and Avoid Mistakes

SoC Design Partitioning to Save Time and Avoid Mistakes
by Daniel Payne on 12-18-2018 at 12:00 pm

I started designing ICs in 1978 and continued through 1986, and each chip used hierarchy and partitioning but our methodology was totally ad-hoc, and documented on paper, so it was time consuming to make revisions to the chip or train someone else on the history or our chip, let alone re-use any portion of our chips again. Those old,… Read More


Cadence Automotive Summit Sensor Enablement Highlights

Cadence Automotive Summit Sensor Enablement Highlights
by Camille Kokozaki on 12-18-2018 at 7:00 am

At the November 14 Cadence Automotive Summit, Ian Dennison, Senior Group Director, outlined sensor enablement technologies and SoC mixed-signal design solutions, from Virtuoso electrically aware design with high current, high reliability, yield and performance tools and methodologies enabling ADAS/AV sensors for vehicle… Read More


Photonics with CurvyCore

Photonics with CurvyCore
by Alex Tan on 12-17-2018 at 12:00 pm

As a preferred carrier to data or energy, photonics technology is becoming broad and diverse. In IC design, silicon-photonics technology has been the enabler of new capabilities and has revolutionized many applications as Moore’s-based scaling started to experience a slowdown. It acts as new on-chip inductor in HPC design … Read More


Intel Discontinues the Custom Foundry Business!

Intel Discontinues the Custom Foundry Business!
by Daniel Nenni on 12-17-2018 at 7:00 am

After mentioning what I heard at IEDM 2018, that Intel was officially closing the merchant foundry business as an aside in a SemiWiki forum discussion, I got a lot of email responses so let me clarify. Honestly I did not think it was a big surprise. Intel Custom Foundry was an ill conceived idea (my opinion) from the very start and was… Read More