Applied Materials (AMAT) is batting clean up in a quarter that has not been pretty. Lately semi stocks seem to have been hit by not only stock specific issues but continued and increasing memory concerns coupled with more macro issues. On top of all this, China trade issues which have in the meantime taken a back burner to other issues… Read More
Synopsys’ Secure Storage Solution for OTP IPFor decades, One-Time Programmable (OTP) memory has been…Read More
Hierarchical Device Planning as an Enabler of System Technology Co-OptimizationAI, hyperscale data centers, and data-intensive workloads are…Read More
SiFive to Power Next-Gen RISC-V AI Data Centers with NVIDIA NVLink FusionIn a strategic move that could reshape the…Read MoreMeasuring Up 7nm IP
The Linley Group is an industry-leading source for independent technology analysis of semiconductors for networking, communications, mobile, and data-center applications. Their Microprocessor Report is widely read as a source of un-biased, no-nonsense analysis of technologies and trends. So, when they dig into something… Read More
Why Do Brilliant People Like to Work Together?
This is the eleventh in the series of “20 Questions with Wally Rhines”
In high technology, there are numerous instances of highly productive groups coming together and generating game-changing ideas and products. This happened at Shockley Semiconductor in the 1960s when Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Jean Hoerni and… Read More
Networking trends for Automotive ADAS Systems
From my restaurant seat today in Lake Oswego, Oregon I watched as an SUV driver backed out and nearly collided with a parked car, so I wanted to wave my arms or start shouting to the driver to warn them about the collision. Cases like this are a daily occurrence to those of us who drive or watch other drivers on the road, so the promises of… Read More
Chip, Package, System Analysis – A User View
While I missed ANSYS (and indeed everyone else) at DAC this year, I was able to attend the ANSYS Innovation Conference last week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. My primary purpose for being there was to listen to a talk by eSilicon which I’ll get to shortly, but before that I sat through a very interesting presentation on the growing… Read More
Enabling Complex System Design Environment
Deterministic, yet versatile. Robust and integrated, yet user-friendly and easily customizable. Those are some desirable characteristics of an EDA solution as the boundaries of our design optimization, verification and analysis keep shifting. A left shift driven by a time-to-market schedule compression, while the process… Read More
What Silicon Valley still gets wrong about innovation
Silicon Valley well exemplifies the saying “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. Very little has changed over the past decade, with the Valley still mired in myth and stale stereotype. Ask any older entrepreneurs or women who have tried to get financing; they will tell you of the walls they keep hitting. Speak to VCs,… Read More
Meeting Analog Reliability Challenges Across the Product Life Cycle
Create a panel discussion about analog IC design and reliability and my curiosity is instantly piqued, so I attended a luncheon discussion at #55DAC moderated by Steven Lewis of Cadence. The panelists were quite deep in their specialized fields:… Read More
Architecting an ML Design
Discussion on machine learning (ML) and hardware design has been picking up significantly in two fascinating areas: how ML can advance hardware design methods and how hardware design methods can advance building ML systems. Here I’ll talk about the latter, particularly about architecting ML-enabled SoCs. This approach is … Read More
A True Signoff for 7nm and Beyond
The Tale of Three Metrics
Meeting PPA (Performance, Power and Area) target is key to a successful design tapeout. These mainstream QoR (Quality of Results) metrics are rather empirical yet inter-correlated and have been expanded to be linked with other metrics such as yield, cost and reliability. While the recent CPU performance… Read More




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