China has always been an intriguing semiconductor puzzle that very few companies have solved and now it is much more puzzling with the current political meandering. The GlobalFoundries vision of having foundries all over the world was very appealing to me back in 2009 and even more so today. Remember, China consumes more than half… Read More





Coupled Electro-thermal Analysis Essential for PowerMOS Design
Power device designers know that when they see a deceptively simple pair of PowerMOS device symbols in the output stage of a power converter circuit schematic, they are actually looking at a massively complex network of silicon and metal interconnect. The corresponding physical devices can have a total device W on the order of … Read More
Emulation from In Circuit to In Virtual
At a superficial level, emulation in the hardware design world is just a way to run a simulation faster. The design to be tested runs on the emulator, connected to whatever test mechanisms you desire, and the whole setup can run many orders of magnitude faster than it could if the design was running inside a software simulator. And … Read More
Restoring Digital Trust – Can China Lead the Way?
I read with interest the US Chamber of Commerce’s assessment of the Made in China (MIC) 2025 plan to transform the world’s most populous nation into an Advanced Manufacturing leader. MIC 2025 covers 10 strategic industries that China identifies as critical to economic growth in the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century, including next-gen… Read More
Open-Silicon Embraces the Latest ISO 9001 Specification with Certification by SGS
A quality standard that stays static and is not itself targeted for continuous improvement, is a standard that is breaking one of the first tenets of quality. This is why the ISO 9001 specification has been updated several times since its introduction in 1987. The first version was fairly modest. The most recent version was released… Read More
Home Automation IoT Company Cuts ASIC Testing Costs
Customer Case Study
digitalSTROM develops smart home automation solutions providing users with superior comfort and a whole new style of living. Based on proprietary ASIC and software, digitalSTROM’s solutions connect electrical household appliances through existing power lines and enable an intelligent home via light… Read More
Why Did Ambiq Micro Select HiFi-5 DSP IP for Next Generation MCU?
Ambiq Micro has built a family of voice processing MCU dedicated to battery powered, energy sensitive systems, supporting mobile application like wearable. The company is facing two strong challenges: support computationally intensive processing (NN-based far field) and speech recognition algorithms, while offering … Read More
The Changing Face of IP Management
Aristotle once said “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. The notion of synergism echoes the importance of leveraging design IPs to the maximum extent with the rest of the system under development, in order to ensure a successful SoC design outcome in a shorter development cycle.
SoC design cost and entry point
For over… Read More
Is ARM TechCon Really Worth it?
The ARM TechCon organizers are asking me what I thought of this year’s conference so here it goes. As you know I am a big fan of ARM TechCon and feel it is one of the better conferences for SoC design. This year however I noticed a big change in demographics. Maybe the location change had something to do with it but I definitely saw different… Read More
Connected Cars High Tech Low Demand
The latest reliability report from Consumer Reports which dumped on domestics and rained glory upon Asian imports highlighted a conundrum facing car makers. The more effort car makers put into innovation, the greater the risk of consumer confusion, system failure and lousy reliability scores.
The picture is even worse if one… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet