As the Internet-of-Things (IoT) markets mature, we are seeing the complexity of IoT systems evolve from simple routing functions that connect IoT edge devices to the cloud into more complex system of systems that manage the interaction between multiple sensor-hubs. IoT sensor-hubs and gateways not only take care of basic care… Read More




Samsung Sloppy Sailor Spending Spree!
Last week, TEL (which is the Japanese equivalent to AMAT & LRCX) reported a June quarter which saw revenues drop to 236B Yen from March’s 261B Yen and saw earnings drop from March’s 47B Yen to June’s 41B Yen, a respective 9.3% decrease and a 12.8% decrease in earnings.
We don’t think this is attributable… Read More
Synopsys Opens up on Emulation
Synopsys hosted a lunch panel on Tuesday of DAC this year, in which verification leaders from Intel, Qualcomm, Wave Computing, NXP and AMD talked about how they are using Synopsys verification technologies. Panelists covered multiple domains but the big takeaway for me was their full-throated endorsement of the ZeBu emulation… Read More
SEMICON West – Advanced Interconnect Challenges
At SEMICON West I attended the imec technology forum where Zsolt Tokei presented “How to Solve the BEOL RC Dilemma” and the SEMICON Economics of Density Scaling session where Larry Clevenger of IBM presented “Interconnect Scaling Strategic for Advanced Semiconductor Nodes”. I also had the opportunity… Read More
Tensilica HiFi 3z DSP Core: Leading Energy Efficiency
Tensilica HiFi DSP family, dedicated to voice and audio processing, is shipping over 1 billion units worldwide annually, thanks to the 75+ licensees. The new HiFi 3z architecture offers more than 1.3X better voice and audio processing performance than its predecessor, the HiFi 3 DSP, which leads the industry in the number of audio… Read More
Semicap Thoughts: ASML AMAT INTEL SAMSUNG TSMC MICRON
ASML reported results in line and slightly ahead of expectations which helped push ASML and the other semicap stocks back to their original valuations prior to the two step pull back that lasted about a month. We are now back to relatively high, record valuations not seen or ever seen previously (at least for a long time) by many companies.… Read More
A Functional Safety Primer for FPGA – and the Rest of Us
Once in a while I come across a vendor-developed webinar which is so generally useful it deserves to be shared beyond the confines of sponsored sites. I don’t consider this spamming – if you choose you can ignore the vendor-specific part of the webinar and still derive significant value from the rest. In this instance, the topic is… Read More
Connected Car as Data Access Battleground
The big news over the weekend was accusations flying in Europe over German car company anti-competitive collusion. While it’s true that European companies of all sorts are able and inclined to legally share information in a manner that is foreign to U.S.-based companies, proving anti-competitive activity will be a high bar for… Read More
CEO Interview: Chris Henderson of Semitracks
In looking at the SemiWiki analytics over the last six years it is clear that the average age of our readers is trending down. (Yes, Google knows how old we are). The 25-35 age group now represents our largest readership and that is supported by the conferences I have attended recently. At the Design Automation Conference last month… Read More
Emulation makes the What to See List
The analysts at Gary Smith EDA produce an annual What To See List for DAC and I quickly noticed that all three major EDA vendors were included on the list for the specific category of emulation. The big problem that emulation addresses is the ability to run in hardware an early version of your SoC so that software developers can get access… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?