After 8 SemiWiki years, 4,386 published blogs, and more than 25 million blog views, I can tell you that IP is the most read semiconductor topic, absolutely, and that trend continues. Another correlating trend (from IP Nest) is the semiconductor IP revenue increase in relation to the semiconductor market (minus memory) which more… Read More
Analog Bits Demos Real-Time On-Chip Power Sensing and Delivery on N2P at the TSMC 2026 Technology SymposiumAnalog Bits has a way of stealing the…Read More
Disaggregating LLM Inference: Inside the SambaNova Intel Heterogeneous Compute BlueprintSambaNova Systems and Intel have introduced a blueprint…Read More
CEO Interview with Johan Wadenholt Vrethem of VoxoWith over two decades of experience bridging technology…Read More
TSMC to Elon Musk: There are no Shortcuts in Building Fabs!The opening of the TSMC 2026 earning call…Read More
Speculation: Silicon’s Most Expensive CompulsionHow Time-Based Scheduling Reclaims Silicon Wasted by Speculative…Read MoreHow to be Smart About DFT for AI Chips
We have entered the age of AI specific processors, where specialized silicon is being produced to tackle the compute needs of AI. Whether they use GPUs, embedded programmable logic or specialized CPUs, many AI chips are based on parallel processing. This makes sense because of the parallel nature of AI computing. As a result, in… Read More
Secretary Chao Unchained @ CES 2020
U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has agreed to mount the stage at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to share her vision of the positive economic impact of technology unleashed from regulatory oversight. It’s a powerful message but it’s going to be a tough sell.
Chao is likely taking the… Read More
Qualcomm Attests Benefits of Mentor’s RealTime DRC for P&R
When floor planning (FP) and place & route (P&R) tools took over from custom layout tools for standard cell based designs, life became a lot better for designers of large digital chips. The beauty of the new flows was that all the internals of the standard cells and many IP blocks were hidden from view, lightening the load … Read More
The 50th Year of Intel, What Happened in 2018
2018 was the 50th year for Intel in the semiconductor business, and their Q4 2018 conference call just happened last week, so I’ll get you all caught up on what they talked about. Bob Swan is the CFO and interim CEO, as the company continues to search for a new CEO after Brian K. was ousted for misconduct. Here’s a quick financial… Read More
Why High-End ML Hardware Goes Custom
In a hand-waving way it’s easy to answer why any hardware goes custom (ASIC): faster, lower power, more opportunity for differentiation, sometimes cost though price isn’t always a primary factor. But I wanted to do a bit better than hand-waving, especially because these ML hardware architectures can become pretty exotic, so … Read More
Switch Design Signoff with IC Validator
The surge of network traffic at the data centers has driven to an increase in network bandwidth, doubling every 12-15 months according to a study conducted on Google’s data centers. The primary drivers to this uptick include the proliferation of cloud computing, more distributed storage architecture, emerging applications… Read More
Mathematics are Hard – That is Why AI Needs Mathematics Hardware
The field of artificial intelligence has relied on heavy inspiration from the world of natural intelligence, such as the human mind, to build working systems that can learn and act on new information based on that learning. In natural networks, neurons do the work, deciding when to fire based on huge numbers of inputs. The relationship… Read More
Accuracy of In-Chip Monitoring for Thermal Guard-banding
I remember working at Intel and viewing my first SPICE netlist for a DRAM chip, because there was this temperature statement with a number after it, so being a new college graduate I asked lots of questions, like, “What is that temperature value?”
My co-worker answered, “Oh, that’s the estimated junction… Read More
Why we will all benefit from the next space race
Until January 3, no human being had ever set eyes upon the “dark side” of the moon: the side always facing away from the Earth. It always remained a mystery. But no longer. China’s National Space Administration successfully landed a lunar lander, Chang’e-4, at South Pole-Aitken, the moon’s largest and deepest basin. Its lunar rover… Read More


Is Intel About to Take Flight?