Machine learning applications in data centers (or “the cloud”) have pervasively changed our environment. Advances in speech recognition and natural language understanding have enabled personal assistants to augment our daily lifestyle. Image classification and object recognition techniques enrich our social media experience,… Read More





Mentor’s Busy ITC and Major Test Product Updates
In conjunction with the 2018 International Test Conference, Mentor has several interesting test announcements. They also have a busy round of technical activities, including a number of technical papers, presentations, tutorials and a poster from a major customer about using Mentor. I’d like to touch on the two product related… Read More
Parasitic Extraction for Advanced Node and 3D-IC Designs
Technology scaling has made positive impacts on device performance, while creating challenges on the interconnects and the fidelity of its manufactured shapes. The process dimension scaling has significantly increased metal and via resistance for advanced nodes 7nm and onward, as shown in figures 1a,1b. Similar to a fancy… Read More
Solving and Simulating in the New Virtuoso RF Solution
Cadence has done a good job of keeping up with the needs of analog RF designs. Of course, the term RF used to be reserved for a thin slice of designs that were used specifically in RF applications. Now, it covers things like SerDes for networking chips that have to operate in the gigahertz range. Add that to the trend of combining RF and… Read More
A Smart Way for Chips to Deal with PVT Issues
We have all become so used to ‘smart’ things that perhaps in a way we have forgotten what it was like before many of the things we use day to day had sensors and microprocessors to help them respond to their environment. Cars are an excellent example. It used to be commonplace to run down your battery by leaving your lights on. Now cars … Read More
The Latest from Samsung Semiconductor
Earlier this Spring, Samsung Foundry held a technology forum, describing their process roadmap and supporting ecosystem developments (link). Recently, the larger Samsung Semiconductor organization conducted a Tech Day at their campus in San Jose, presenting (and demo-ing) a broader set of products. The focus of the day was… Read More
Intel Q3 2018 Jibber Jabber
This is what happens when you have a CFO acting as a semiconductor CEO, and Robert Holmes is a career CFO with zero semiconductor experience or education. Granted, no way did he write the opening statement, but it was full of jibber jabber anyway. The real disappointing jibber jabber was from our own Murthy Renduchintala on the status… Read More
Is Your BMW Secure?
The cybersecurity of automobiles has become an increasingly critical issue in the context of autonomous vehicle development. While creators of autonomous vehicles may have rigorous safety and testing practices, these efforts may be for naught if the system are compromised by ethical or unethical hackers.
Establishing cybersecurity… Read More
Semiconductor stocks free fall as bad news gets worse
Semiconductor stocks have had another significant down leg as the bad news continues to pile on. Bad news in this case doesn’t come in threes , it comes in droves. TI is perhaps very scary news as it is a rather broad based supplier of semiconductors that has fared better than more pure play chip suppliers. TI gave weak guidance… Read More
Carl Icahn Activist Activities
The “20 Questions with Wally Rhines” series continues
Carl Icahn is a remarkably charming person. You might expect him to be a mean, aggressive adversary but he actually jokes about his foibles, tells stories about interesting people and gently poses questions. “I thought Jerry Yang just didn’t want to sell his Yahoo… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside