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
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
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
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
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
Does the G in GDDR6 stand for Goldilocks?
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
Who is Responsible for SIP Revenue Decline in Q2 2018?
According with ESDA, EDA revenues have grown YoY by 16.2% in Q2 2018, and this is the good news for our industry. The bad news is the decline of SIP (Design IP) revenues, by (3.1%) at the same time. As far as I am concerned, this figure looks weird, so I will try to understand the reason why SIP category can go wrong in a healthy EDA market,… Read More
Avionics and Embedded FPGA IP
The design of electronic systems for aerospace applications shares many of the same constraints as apply to consumer products – e.g., cost (including NRE), power dissipation, size, time-to-market. Both market segments are driven to leverage the integration benefits of process scaling. … Read More
The Shape of Semiconductor Things to Come
Given that the semiconductor industry is clearly in the midst of a down cycle (even though there are cycle deniers, also members of the flat earth society…), most investors and industry participants want to know the timing of the down cycle and the shape of the recovery as we want to know when its safe to buy the stocks again. … Read More
Technology Behind the Chip
Tom Dillinger and I attended the Silvaco SURGE 2018 event in Silicon Valley last week with several hundred of our semiconductor brethren. Tom has a couple blogs ready to go but first let’s talk about the keynote by Silvaco CEO David Dutton. David isn’t your average EDA CEO, he spent the first 8 years of his career at Intel then spent … Read More
Semiconductor Equipment Spending Healthy