When I was young, functional safety for automobiles consisted of checking tread depth and replacing belts and hoses before long trips. I’ll confess that this was a long time ago. Though even not that long ago, the only way you found out about failing systems was going to the mechanic and having them hook up a reader to the OBD port. Or,… Read More




Webinar: RISC-V IoT Security IP
Disruptive technology and disruptive business models are the lifeblood of the semiconductor industry. My first disruptive experience was with Artisan Components in 1998. The semiconductor industry started cutting IP groups which resulted in a bubble of start-up IP companies including Artisan, Virage Logic, Aspec Technologies,… Read More
Block RAM integration for an Embedded FPGA
The upcoming Design Automation Conference in San Francisco includes a very interesting session –“Has the Time for Embedded FPGA Come at Last?” Periodically, I’ve been having coffee with the team at Flex Logix, to get their perspective on this very question – specifically, to learn about the key features that customers are seeking… Read More
Semiconductor, EDA Industries Maturing? Wally Disagrees
Wally Rhines (President and CEO of Mentor, A Siemens Business) has been pushing a contrarian view versus the conventional wisdom that the semiconductor business, and by extension EDA, is slowing down. He pitched this at DVCon and more recently at U2U where I got to hear the pitch and talk to him afterwards.
What causes maturing is… Read More
UBER car accident: Verifying more of the same versus the long-tail cases
The recent fatal accident involving an UBER autonomous car, was reportedly not caused – as initially assumed – by a failure of the many sensors on the car to recognize the cyclist. It was instead caused by a failure of the software to take the right decision in regard to that “object”. The system apparently… Read More
CEO Interview: YJ Su of Anaglobe
AnaGlobe Technology, Inc. is a leader in layout integration solutions that have been adopted by world-wide technology leading companies including the foundries, fabless, design services, packaging, panel, and IP companies. I know several of Anaglobe’s customers and am happy to work with them, absolutely.
The following… Read More
Chip Equipment where to from here?
We may know the top, do we know the bottom? What is the downside in NAND, DRAM, Foundry. Can China help or is risk worse than upside?
It would appear that our concerns in our preview piece prior to the AMAT call came true as the stock now has a “4” handle, NAND is in question and display is down.
However its not like business … Read More
AMAT has OK Q2 but Q3 flat to down
“Puts & Takes” “Reduced NAND Expectations” 2019 to be down from 2018. Applied Materials reported a good quarter coming in at $1.22 EPS and $4.567B in revenues versus street of $1.14 and $4.45B.
However if we back out the buy back of 4% it would have been around $1.17 so a slight beat. Guidance was for … Read More
SPICE Model Generation by Machine Learning
It was 1988 when I got into SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis)while I was characterizing a 1.5 μm Standard cell library developed by students at my Alma-Mata Furtwangen University in Germany. My professor Dr. Nielinger was not only my advisor he also wrote the first SPICE bible in German language. At that… Read More
ZTE Caving shows China Trade Tirade is Hollow
We have been watching the ZTE saga play out on the public stage as we think it is an extremely important leading example of how the administration will truly act. As we all know, actions speak louder than words, and in the case of ZTE our words said one thing and our actions said something else. We need to analyze what the actions really… Read More
Intel Foundry Delivers!