Last week saw a unique confluence of events that continue the negative news flow in semicap following the story about GloFo. At a financial conference, Micron’s CFO said NAND prices were declining, this was on top of an analyst note in the morning about the same issue. Even though this should be no surprise as memory has had … Read More





Mentor Graphics Makes a Transition
This is the fourteenth in the series of “20 Questions with Wally Rhines”
I joined Mentor Graphics (now Mentor, A Siemens Business), in late 1993. Tom Engibous, one of my direct reporting people at TI, was promoted to replace me as head of the Semiconductor business of TI and I moved on to what I knew would be a real challenge,… Read More
Turnkey 2.5D HBM2 Custom SoC SiP Solution for Deep Learning and Networking Applications
Before we jump into the specifics, let us understand what’s driving custom solutions in the high performance computing and networking space. It’s the growing demand for core capacity and greater performance, which is due to the increase in the level of parallelism and multitasking required to handle the enormous amount of data… Read More
IEDM Preview 2018
The International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is one of the premier technical conferences covering semiconductor technology and is a must attend event. This years conference will be held December 1[SUP]st[/SUP] through 5th, 2018 at the Hilton San Francisco Union
Square hotel.… Read More
A Fresh Idea in Differential Energy Analysis
When I posted earlier on Qualcomm presenting with ANSYS on differential energy analysis, I assumed this was just the usual story on RTL power estimation being more accurate for relative estimation between different implementations. I sold them short. This turned out to be a much more interesting methodology for optimizing total… Read More
Accelerating Design and Manufacturing at the 25th Annual IEEE Electronic Design Process Symposium
25th annual IEEE Electronic Design Process Symposium
Accelerating Design and Manufacturing
September 13 & 14, 2018, SEMI, 673 S. Milpitas Blvd, Milpitas, CA 95035
This year marks a milestone in EDPS’s history as it turns 25. The event will be held at SEMI’s new headquarter facility and will provide a forum for EDA, foundry … Read More
Unhackable Product Claims are a Fiasco Waiting to Happen
Those who think that that technology can be made ‘unhackable’, don’t comprehend the overall challenges and likely don’t understand what ‘hacked’ means.
Trust is the currency of security. We all want our technology to be dependable, easy to use, and secure. It is important to understand both the benefits… Read More
USB 3.x IP Revenue Have Grown by 31% in 2017 (IPnest)
Despite the strong consolidation in the semiconductor industry, the Design IP market is going well, very well with YoY growth of 12%+ in 2017, according with the “Design IP Report” from IPnest. If we look at the Interface IP category (20% growth in 2017) and analyze the IP revenues by protocols, we can see that USB IP is amazingly healthy,… Read More
The Ever-Changing ASIC Business
The cell-based ASIC business that we know today was born in the early 1980s and was pioneered by companies like LSI Logic and VLSI Technology. Some of this history is covered in Chapter 2 of our book, “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”. The ASIC business truly changed the world. Prior to this revolution,… Read More
IP Management Using both Git and Methodics
I use Quicken to manage my business and personal finances because it saves me so much time by downloading all of my transactions from Chase for credit card, Amazon for credit card, Wells Fargo for banking and Schwab for IRA. Likewise, for IP management in SoC design you want an app like Quicken that plays well with other tools that you… Read More
Why I Think Intel 3.0 Will Succeed