In life, there are some things that just go together. Imagine the world without peanut butter and jelly, eggs and potatoes, telephones and voicemail, or the internet and search engines. In the world of computing there are many such examples – UARTS and FIFO’s, processor cores and GPU’s, etc. Another trait all these things have is… Read More





Capex Driving Overcapacity?
Semiconductor capital expenditures (cap ex) in 2017 will increase significantly from 2016. In August, Gartner forecast 2017 cap ex growth of 10.2% and IC Insights projected 20.2% growth. SEMI expects spending on semiconductor fabrication equipment will increase 37%. Cap ex growth is primarily driven by increased capacity… Read More
Nvidia’s Pegasus Putsch!
There hasn’t been this much excitement in Munich since the 1920’s. Nvidia’s great pivot was on display at the GPU Technology Conference Munich 2017. Digital dashboards are out and robotaxis are in as Nvidia narrows its focus on the tip of the automotive industry disruption spear.
To be clear, Nvidia is triangulating on the automotive… Read More
Software Defined Networks (on Chip) – NetSpeed Systems and UltraSoC Team Up to Use Embedded Analytics to Enable Next Generation SoCs
NetSpeed Systems is known for their network-on-chip (NoC) IP that enables complex heterogeneous SoC architectures. NetSpeed IP supports both non-coherent and coherent memory and I/O schemes as well as configurable, customized last level cache optimization through their Orion, Gemini and Pegasus IP respectively. They are… Read More
Arm 2017 TechCon Keynote Simon Segar!
Now that the dust has settled with the Softbank acquisition I must say that Arm is truly a different company. There are now a lot of new faces from outside the semiconductor industry, which is a good thing, and a lot less stress from Wall Street which is an even better thing. Simon can now wear whatever he wants without the worry of lowering… Read More
Navigating the System-in-a-Package Manufacturing Ecosystem
Being an old ASIC physical design guy, I tend to think of ASICs from a “bond-pads-in” perspective. This week however, I had a very eye-opening discussion with Dan Leung, Director of Packaging and Assembly for Open-Silicon, that totally changed my perspective. While I had been exposed many times to the concept of systems-in-a-package… Read More
Good Library Hygiene Takes More Than an Occasional Scrub
You don’t shower only before you have to go to an important meeting (teenagers excepted). Surgical teams go further, demanding a strict regimen of hygiene be followed before anyone is allowed into an operating room. Yet we tend to assume that libraries and physical IP (analog, memories, other physical blocks) are checked and pronounced… Read More
Open source RISC-V ISA brings a new wrinkle to the processor market
By now most people are quite comfortable with the idea of using an open source operating system for many computing tasks. It speaks volumes that Unix, and Linux in particular, is used in the vast majority of engineering, financial, data base, machine learning, data center, telecommunications and many other applications. It was… Read More
Timing Analysis for Embedded FPGA’s
The initial project planning for an SoC design project faces a difficult engineering decision with regards to the “margin” that should be included as part of timing closure. For cell-based blocks, the delay calculation algorithms within the static timing analysis (STA) flow utilize various assumptions to replace… Read More
Silicon Creations talks about 7nm IP Verification for AMS Circuits
Designing at 7nm is a big deal because of the costs to make masks and then produce silicon that yields at an acceptable level, and Silicon Creations is one company that has the experience in designing AMS IP like: PLL, Serializer-Deserializer, IOs, Oscillators. Why design at 7nm? Lots of reasons – lower power, higher speeds,… Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment