General Motors has had wireless connections to its cars for more than 21 years, thanks to Project Beacon, better known as OnStar, now operated as Global Connected Consumer Experience. OnStar has likely saved hundreds of lives, if not thousands, by summoning emergency responders to the scenes of crashes where airbags deployed.… Read More





Webinar: The Emergence of FPGA Prototyping for ASIC and SoC Design
One of the more interesting markets that I cover is FPGA Prototyping. Interesting because it is fast growing ($150-250M) and interesting because it is all about design starts and design starts are the lifeblood of the semiconductor industry.
If you are interested in FPGA prototyping you might want to start with the 30+ S2C Inc blogs… Read More
IEDM 2017 – Controlling Threshold Voltage with Work Function Metals
As I have said many times, IEDM is one of the premier conferences for semiconductor technology. On Sunday before the formal conference started I took the “Boosting Performance, Ensuring Reliability, Managing Variation in sub-5nm CMOS” short course. The second module in the course was “Multi-Vt Engineering… Read More
Wanted by January 30th: Paper for DAC IP Track 2018!
DAC 2018 will take place in San Francisco in June (24 to 28) and you have a fantastic opportunity to present a paper in the IP track! In fact, the deadline has been extended to January 30[SUP]th[/SUP] to submit your proposal.
Let’s make it clear: you are not expected to send the completed paper by this date, just the following:
- The title
Webinar: Fast-track SoC Verification – Reduce time-to-first-test with Synopsys VC AutoTestbench
There seems to be a general sense that we have the foundations for block/IP verification more or less under control, thanks to UVM standardizing infrastructure for directed and constrained-random testing, along with class libraries providing building blocks to simplify verification reuse, build sequence tests, verify register… Read More
Designing an SoC for 3D TV Without using the Funny Glasses
In the blur of activities at DAC last year I visited the Mentor booth a few times and had just a few minutes to glance at a 3D TV display that didn’t require me to wear any funny glasses, kind of novel I thought at the time because I’ve read that the market of 3D TV sets is being hampered by requiring viewers to wear glasses. The… Read More
Context is Everything – especially for autonomous vehicle IP
GM has just announced that it will introduce a car with no steering wheel or pedals in 2019. According to their statement, they have already planned four phases of their autonomous driving system, and they will plan many more. However, before we jump into this latest car and not grab the wheel for a spin, it is reasonable to ask about… Read More
TSMC 5nm and EUV Update 2018
The TSMC Q4 2017 earnings call transcript is up and I found it to be quite interesting for several reasons. First and foremost, this is the last call Chairman Dr. Morris Chang will participate in which signifies the end of a world changing era for me and the fabless semiconductor ecosystem, absolutely. TSMC announced his retirement… Read More
Simulation and Formal – Finding the Right Balance
Simulation dominates hardware functional verification today and likely will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile formal verification, once thought to be a possible challenger for the title, has instead converged on a more effective role as a complement to simulation. Formal excels at finding problems… Read More
How many engineers does it take to get an IoT security certificate?
Spoiler alert, the answer is none!
Let me take you back to the beginning to explain that answer.
For the sake of this discussion, I will reduce a complex IoT solution to three fundamental blocks:
- IoT node
- IoT Gateway
- IoT Server
The IoT node is a sensor that converts analog, physical world context into digital data. The node has to have… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet