When it comes to autonomous mobility – things are changing awfully fast. A “deep dive” workshop at Michelin’s Movin’ On 2018 event in Montreal (concluding today) dug into the issue revealing hopes and anxieties shared by executives culled from a wide range of industry constituencies. The overall sense… Read More





Is This the Death Knell for PKI? I think so…
It was 1976 when distinguished scholars Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published the first practical method of establishing a shared secret-key over an authenticated communications channel without using a prior shared secret. The Diffie-Hellman methodology became known as Public Key Infrastructure or PKI.
That was… Read More
20 Questions with Wally Rhines
When I first started blogging in 2009 my sound byte was, “I blog for food” and the first lunch invitation I received was from Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines, we have been friends ever since. Wally has an incredible mind with a memory to match, coupled with his charm and depth of experience I would easily say that Dr. Walden… Read More
When FPGA Design Looks More Like ASIC Design
I am sure there are many FPGA designers who are quite content to rely on hardware vendor tools to define, check, implement and burn their FPGAs, and who prefer to test in-system to validate functionality. But that approach is unlikely to work when you’re building on the big SoC platforms – Zynq, Arria and even the big non-SoC devices.… Read More
Are memory makers colluding against China?
Maybe OMEC is the new OPEC? A bargaining chip in June trade show down?
China has started an apparent investigation into pricing of DRAM memory with Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix as targets. We find this somewhat coincidental given the current trade issues. Memory pricing has been unusually strong for a very long time. Much longer … Read More
John Lee: Market Trends, Raising the Bar on Signoff
I talked to John Lee (GM of the ANSYS Semiconductor BU) recently about his views on market trends and the ANSYS big-picture theme for DAC 2018. He set the stage by saying he really liked Wally’s view on trends (see my blog on Wally’s keynote at U2U). John said these confirm what he is seeing – a trend to specialization, some around… Read More
Being Intelligent about AI ASICs
The progression from CPU to GPU, FPGA and then ASIC affords an increase in throughput and performance, but comes at the price of decreasing flexibility and generality. Like most new areas of endeavor in computing, artificial intelligence (AI) began with implementations based on CPU’s and software. And, as have so many other applications,… Read More
SemiWiki and SmartDV on Verification IP
Bernard Murphy and I spent time with the SmartDV folks in preparation for the Design Automation Conference later this month. Bernard is an internationally recognized verification expert so his feedback is often sought after by emerging and leading verification companies, absolutely. Verification IP is a crowded market so … Read More
Imec technology forum 2018 – the future of memory
At the Imec technology forum in Belgium Gouri Sankar Kar and Arnaud Furnemont presented memory and storage perspectives and I also got to interview Arnaud. Arnaud leads overall memory development at Imec and personally leads NAND and DNA research.
Memory research is focused on power, energy, speed and cost with energy and throughput… Read More
Single-Chip Narrow-Band IoT
Many factors go into building a competitive solution for the IoT, but few are as important for high-volume applications as low cost – not just chip cost but total system cost. If your customers are going to deploy thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of your devices in cities, factories, logistics applications, power grids… Read More
Semiconductor Equipment Spending Healthy