Bluetooth®, WiFi, LTE, and 5G technologies enable wireless connectivity for a range of applications. While each offer unique features and advantages, designers need now to decide which protocol to integrate in a single chip after having test the market by using wireless off-chip solutions. Bluetooth 5 builds upon the success… Read More





Oracle is out of the Chip Business!
This is a story I have been tracking for some time now. Oracle is one of the companies I was enamored with early in my career, Sun microsystems as well. They are both legacies here in Silicon Valley, absolutely. I can now confirm that Oracle is getting out of the chip business. Oracle got into the chip business with the $7.4B acquisition… Read More
Semiconductor Reliability and Product Qualification
This week, we are continuing our discussion of various topics that Semitracks addresses in their training activities. One area that they focus on quite a bit is Semiconductor Reliability and Product Qualification.
One of the key activities that a Product Engineer will coordinate is the qualification of new products before they… Read More
Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm at DAC
I’m a user of many Samsung products as my family has Samsung Galaxy smart phones and my MacBook Pro uses Samsung SSD for storage, so at DAC I attended a breakfast panel with presenters from Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm. This was the second day of DAC and they served us breakfast, and with the big names on the panel the room was… Read More
Eclipse 2017: Drive All Night!
The reports are coming in now that Apple is working on self-driving car technology in support of developing shuttle buses – not unlike the dozen or so other companies like Local Motors and Navya working on the same idea. The message is clear that the only way to reduce traffic and congestion is to get human beings to pack themselves… Read More
TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum 2017 Preview!
The TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum is upon us again. I have yet to meet a disappointed attendee so it is definitely worth your time: Networking with more than 1,000 semiconductor professionals, the food, mingling with the 50+ EDA, IP, and Services Companies, the food, and of course the content. The 7nm and 7nm EUV updates alone are worth… Read More
A Functional Safety Primer for FPGA – the White Paper
Following up on their webinar on functional safety in FPGA-based designs, Synopsys have now published a white paper expanding on some of those topics. For those who didn’t get a chance to see the webinar this blog follows the white paper flow and is similar but not identical to my webinar blog, particularly around differences between… Read More
Webinar Alert: High Bandwidth Memory ASIC SiPs for HPC and Networking Applications
Calling all ASIC designers working on High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) access architectures in high-performance computing (HPC), networking, deep learning, virtual reality, gaming, cloud computing and data center applications. You won’t want to miss this upcoming webinar focused on system integration aspects of a HBM2 ASIC… Read More
HBM offers SOC’s dense and fast memory options
Dual in-line memory modules (DIMM’s ) with double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory (DDR SDRAM) have been around since before we were worried about Y2K. Over the intervening years this format for provisioning memory has evolved from supporting DDR around 1995, to DDR1 in 2000, DDR2 in 2003, DDR4 in 2007 and DDR4… Read More
Extraction Features for 7nm
Frequent Semiwiki readers are familiar with the importance of close collaboration between the foundries and EDA tool developers, to provide the crucial features required by new process nodes. Perhaps the best illustration of the significance of this collaboration is the technical evolution of layout parasitic extraction.… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet