The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is in its 50th year believe it or not! The first one was in New York (1967) with 250 exhibitors and 17,500 attendees. Portable radios and TVs were all the rage followed by VCRs in 1970 and camcorders and compact discs in 1981. This year there will be 3,900+ exhibits and an estimated 170,000 attendees… Read More





Self-Monitoring SoCs – An Idea Coming of Age
In a former life I was the GM of a business where we built specialized structures used for semiconductor process bring-up, characterization and monitoring. These monitoring structures were placed in wafer scribe-lines and were used to monitor key parameters during wafer processing. The structures provided feedback to automated… Read More
Application binary interface, get this right and RISC-V is all yours
Starting a career in static timing analysis domain, and now actively working on an opensource implementation flow of RISC-V architecture, has been a journey. For last couple of months, I guess from around March this year, I was hooked to RISC-V buzz which was all over my Linkedin, my messages.
Being an STA and Physical design engineer,… Read More
Snapback behavior determines ESD protection effectiveness
Terms like avalanche breakdown and impact ionization sound like they come from the world of science fiction. They do indeed come from a high stakes world, but one that plays out over and over again here and now, on a microscopic scale in semiconductor devices – namely as part of electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. Semiconductor… Read More
Shifting Left with Static and Formal Verification
Unless you have been living in a cave for the last several years, by now you know that “Shift Left” is a big priority in product design and delivery, and particularly in verification. Within the semiconductor industry I believe Intel coined this term as early as 2002, though it seems now to be popular throughout all forms of technology… Read More
DSP Benchmarks and Libraries for ARC DSP families
Synopsys DesignWareARC HS4xD family is a perfect example of high performance DSP, enhanced RISC CPU IP core, able to address high-end IoT, mid to high-end audio or baseband control. ARC HS4xD architecture is 10-stage pipeline for high Fmax, resulting in excellent RISC efficiency with 5.2 CoreMark per MHz. ARC EMxD processors… Read More
Webinar: ADAS and Real-Time Vision Processing
ADAS is in many ways the epicenter of directions in the driverless car (or bus or truck). Short of actually running the car hands-free through a whole trip, ADAS has now advanced beyond mere warnings to providing some level of steering and braking control (in both cases for collision avoidance), providing more adaptive cruise control,… Read More
Starblaze Uses Synopsys DesignWare IP to Launch SSD Controller SoC
I recently wrote an article about Synopsys’ DesignWare Security IP for the Internet-of-Things market and was interested to see that a startup, Starblaze Technology, has now used parts of the same IP in its latest Solid-State Drive (SSD) controller. The security IP caught my eye, but the rest of the story really put things into focus.… Read More
Creative Noise-Reduction in Automotive AMS
Automotive applications are one of the hottest domains today in semiconductor design. We’re bombarded daily with articles on new hybrids, electric cars, ADAS and autonomous cars, trucks and busses. All of these applications are certainly amazing, but the devices that make them work still have to deal with the same old challenges,… Read More
Synopsys White Paper on IoT Security – Introduces DesignWare Root-of-Trust Module
As the internet of things (IoT) continues its climb to a trillion devices, there has been many articles and books written on the need for securing those devices. With all the IoT gear that I seem to be picking up as Christmas presents, I feel like I’m doing my part to help the market get there, but I have to say, I sure hope the SoC designers… Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment