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Trade war could be the tipping point for American manufacturing

Trade war could be the tipping point for American manufacturing
by Vivek Wadhwa on 10-23-2018 at 7:00 am

When Western companies moved manufacturing to China, it was all about minimizing costs. China was a developing country with labor costs among the lowest in the world. It also offered massive subsidies and readily turned a blind eye to labor abuse and environmental degradation.

Today, China is the world’s second-largest economy… Read More


The Latest in Parasitic Netlist Reduction and Visualization

The Latest in Parasitic Netlist Reduction and Visualization
by admin on 10-22-2018 at 12:00 pm

The user group events held by EDA companies offer a unique opportunity to hear from designers and CAD engineers who are actually using the EDA tools “in the trenches”. Some user presentations are pretty straightforward – e.g., providing a quality-of-results (QoR) design comparison when invoking a new tool feature added to a recent… Read More


TSMC Q3 2018 Earnings Call Discussion!

TSMC Q3 2018 Earnings Call Discussion!
by Daniel Nenni on 10-22-2018 at 7:00 am

The TSMC OIP Forum was very upbeat this year and now we know why. It wasn’t long ago that some media outlets and a competitor said 7nm would not be a popular node because it is too expensive blah blah blah. People inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem however know otherwise. As I have said before, 7nm will be another strong node … Read More


ASML most immune to slow down due to lead times Not LRCX

ASML most immune to slow down due to lead times Not LRCX
by Robert Maire on 10-21-2018 at 7:00 am

ASML reported EUR2.78B in revenues with EUR2.08B in systems. 58% was for memory. EUV was EUR513M with 5 systems. Importantly orders were for EUR2.20B in systems at 64% memory and 5 EUV tools. This was likely better than expectations given the overall industry weakness. EPS of EUR1.60 was more or less in line with expectations. Guidance… Read More


Portable Stimulus enables new design and verification methodologies

Portable Stimulus enables new design and verification methodologies
by Jim Hogan on 10-19-2018 at 12:00 pm

My usual practice when investing is to look at startup companies and try to understand if the market they are looking to serve has a significant opportunity for a new and disruptive technology. This piece compiles the ideas that I used to form an investment thesis in Portable Stimulus. Once collected, I often share ideas to get feedback.… Read More


Honey I Shrunk the EDA TAM

Honey I Shrunk the EDA TAM
by Daniel Nenni on 10-19-2018 at 7:00 am

The “20 Questions with Wally Rhines” series continues

Throughout the history of the EDA industry, pricing models have caused discontinuities in the way the industry operates. For a variety of competitive reasons, individual companies have developed ways to change the pricing model in an attempt to secure competitive… Read More


Musk the Magician and Data Monetizer

Musk the Magician and Data Monetizer
by Roger C. Lanctot on 10-19-2018 at 7:00 am

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk pulled a rabbit out of his hat last month making thousands of cars vanish and converting reports of production and delivery hell into market leadership for premium sedan deliveries. Following SEC legal action and a podcast where he appeared to be drinking scotch and smoking marijuana and after surrendering… Read More


ARM Turns up the Heat in Infrastructure

ARM Turns up the Heat in Infrastructure
by Bernard Murphy on 10-18-2018 at 7:00 am

I don’t know if it was just me but I left TechCon 2017 feeling, well, uninspired. Not that they didn’t put on a good show with lots of announcements, but it felt workman-like. From anyone else it would have been a great show, but this is TechCon. I expect to leave with my mind blown in some manner and it wasn’t. I wondered if the SoftBank … Read More


Advanced Materials and New Architectures for AI Applications

Advanced Materials and New Architectures for AI Applications
by admin on 10-17-2018 at 7:00 am

Over the past 50 years in our industry, there have been three invariant principles:

  • Moore’s Law drives the pace of Si technology scaling
  • system memory utilizes MOS devices (for SRAM and DRAM)
  • computation relies upon the “von Neumann” architecture
Read More

Does the G in GDDR6 stand for Goldilocks?

Does the G in GDDR6 stand for Goldilocks?
by Tom Simon on 10-16-2018 at 12:00 pm

In the wake of TSMC’s recent Open Innovation Platform event, I spoke to Frank Ferro, Senior Director of Product Management at Rambus. His presentation on advanced memory interfaces for high-performance systems helped to shed some light on the evolution of system memory for leading edge applications. System implementers now… Read More