In case you missed it, Fractal is now officially part of the TSMC EDA Alliance. Fractal Crossfire is the leading IP and Library QA tool used by TSMC and many of TSMC’s customers so this is for the greater IP good, absolutely. Fractal has also released a new white paper “Setup Generation for Fractal Crossfire” that we can talk about but… Read More




Our Autonomous Moonshot
Keynoting the TU-Automotive event in Novi, Mich., last week on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy I took the occasion to note the lofty visions to which Robert and his brother, President John F. Kennedy, aspired. We face our own challenges in the automotive industry today, with an annual global… Read More
The Best of IP at DAC 2018 Conference
Design IP is going well, with 12% YoY growth in 2017, even if the market is about $3.5B. But Design IP is serving a $400B semiconductor market. Can you imagine the future of the semi market if the chip makers couldn’t have access to Design IP? The same is true for EDA: it’s a niche market (CAE revenues was about $3B and IC Physical Design… Read More
Stanford and Semiconductors: A Unique Combination in the 1960s
This is the second in the series of “20 Questions with Wally Rhines”
At 8am on my first day of graduate school at Stanford, I joined the “Structure of Materials” class taught by Craig Barrett, the youngest faculty member in the Materials Science and Engineering Department. Craig had just returned from a post-doc in … Read More
2018 Semiconductor Forecasts Revised Up
Forecasts for 2018 semiconductor market growth have been revised upward from earlier in the year. In January to February 2018, projections ranged from 5.9% from Mike Cowan to our 12% at Semiconductor Intelligence. Forecasts released in March to June range from Gartner’s 11.8% to our 16%. The latest forecasts average an increase… Read More
Foundry Partnership Simplifies Design for Reliability
This builds on a couple of topics I have covered for quite a while from an analysis point of view – integrity and reliability. The power distribution network and some other networks like clock trees are particularly susceptible to both IR-drop and electromigration (EM) problems. The first can lead to intermittent timing failures,… Read More
Looking Ahead: What is Next for IoT
Over the past several years, the number of devices connected via Internet of Things (IoT) has grown exponentially, and it is expected that number will only continue to grow. By 2020, 50 billion connected devices are predicted to exist, thanks to the many new smart devices that have become standard tools for people and businesses… Read More
Mentor Emulation Platform Now available on Amazon Web Services
Emulation is a hotly contested EDA market segment (which is being won by Mentor) and EDA in the Cloud is a trending topic so putting the two together is a very big deal, absolutely.
The following is a quick email Q&A with Jean-Marie Brunet, Director of Marketing, Emulation Division, Mentor, a Siemens Business. If you have other… Read More
ISO 26262 Traceability Requirements for Automotive Electronics Design
Reading the many articles on SemiWiki and other publications we find experts talking about the automotive market, mostly because it’s in growth mode, has large volumes and vehicles consume more semiconductors every year. OK, that’s on the plus side, but what about functional safety for automotive electronics?… Read More
Thermal and Reliability in Automotive
Thermal considerations have always been a concern in electronic systems but to a large extent these could be relatively well partitioned from other concerns. Within a die you analyze for mean and peak temperatures and mitigate with package heat-sinks, options to de-rate the clock, or a variety of other methods. At the system level… Read More
Intel Foundry Delivers!