I think most of us have come to terms with the need for multiple verification platforms, from virtual prototyping, through static and formal verification, to simulation, emulation and FPGA-based prototyping. The verification problem space is simply too big, in size certainly but also in dynamic range, to be effectively addressed… Read More



35 Semiconductor IP Companies Hold 2nd Annual Conference
Our smart phone driven semiconductor economy consumes a lot of IP blocks to enable quick product development cycles, often annually updating with new models to choose from. So where do you find all of the best semiconductor IP, verification IP and embedded software? Well, one place is at the 2nd annual REUSE conference, scheduled… Read More
What are you ready to mobilize for FPGA debug?
There are 3 common misconceptions about debugging FPGA with the real hardware:
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RISC-V Business
I was at the 7[SUP]th[/SUP] RISC-V Workshop for two days this week. It was hosted by Western Digital at their headquarters in Milpitas. If you have not been following RISC-V, it is an open source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) for processor design. The initiative started at Berkeley, and has been catching on like wildfire. … Read More
IP-SoC 2017: IP Innovation, Foundries, Low Power and Security
The 20[SUP]th[/SUP] IP-SoC conference will be held in Grenoble, France, on December 6-7, 2017. IP-SoC is not just a marketing fest, it’s the unique IP centric conference, with presentations reflecting the complete IP ecosystem: IP suppliers, foundries, industry trends and applications, with a focus on automotive. It will … Read More
Making Your Next Chip Self-Aware
One holy grail of AI software developers is to create a system that is self-aware, or sentient. A less lofty goal than sentient AI is for chip designers to know how each specific chip responds to Process variations, Voltage levels and Temperature changes. If a design engineer knew exactly which process corner that each chip was fabricated… Read More
Hierarchy Applied to Semiconductor IP Reuse
When I first started doing IC design back in 1978 we had hierarchical designs, and that was doing a relatively simple 16Kb DRAM chip with only 32,000 transistors using 6um (aka 6,000 nm) design rules. SoC designs today make massive use of hierarchy at all levels of IC design: IC Layout, transistor netlist, gate level netlist, RTL … Read More
A Crossover MCU
Back in the day we had processors which consolidated computing power onto a chip, and out of these sprang (if you’ll excuse the Biblical imagery) microcontrollers (MCUs) in one direction and increasingly complex system-on-chip (SoC) processors in another direction. SoCs are used everywhere today, in smartphones, many IoT … Read More
Multi-Channel Multi Rate FEC Engine Webinar with Open Silicon
I will be pleased to moderate on December 7[SUP]th[/SUP] the Open-Silicon webinar addressing the benefits of the multi-channel multi-rate forward error correction (MCMR FEC) IP and the role it plays in high-bandwidth networking applications, especially those where the bit error rate is very high, such as high speed SerDes … Read More
Outsourced Operations: Reduced Risk, Fast Ramp, and Managed Complexity
One of the more interesting semiconductor success stories is Apple and how they transformed from a struggling computer company to a dominant chip maker. We covered this story in quite a bit of detail in our book “Mobile Unleashed” in Chapter 7 “From Cupertino” but the short answer to how they did it is: Outsourced Operations.
Apple’s… Read More
Intel Foundry is a Low Risk Aternative to TSMC