Out of college my first job was doing circuit design at the transistor-level with Intel, and to get accurate SPICE netlists for simulation we had to manually count the squares of parasitic interconnect for diffusion, poly-silicon and metal layers. Talk about a burden and chance for mistakes, I’m so thankful that EDA companies… Read More




Power and Performance Optimization for Embedded FPGA’s
Last month, I made a “no-brainer” forecast that 2017 would be the year in which embedded FPGA (eFPGA) IP would emerge as a key differentiator for new SoC designs (link to the earlier article here).
The fusion of several technical and market factors are motivating design teams to incorporate programmable logic functionality… Read More
Zero Power Sensing
We’ve become pretty good at reducing power in IoT edge devices, to the point that some are expected to run for up to 10 years on a single battery charge. But what if you wanted to go lower still or if, perhaps, your design can’t push power down to a level that would meet that goal? One area in systems where it can be challenging to further … Read More
"Ten-hut!" Attending the Signal Integrity Bootcamp
The engineering team for the design and analysis of a complex system consists of a diverse set of skills — with the increasing emphasis on both high-speed interface design and multi-domain power management, a critical constituent of the team is the group of signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) engineers.
The training… Read More
Plasmonics Integrates Photonics and Electronics
In the last year we have seen a marked increase in activity around the integrated photonics space, especially around silicon-based photonics. Last year the American Institute for Manufacturing of Photonics (better known as AIM Photonics) was started to boot-strap U.S. efforts in integrated photonics. We also saw multiple … Read More
Mentor gets Busy at DVCon
You’d expect Mentor to be covering a lot of bases at DVCon and you wouldn’t be wrong. They’re hosting tutorials, a lunch, papers, posters, there’s a panel and of course they’ll be on the exhibit floor. I’ll start with an important tutorial that you really should attend, Monday morning, on creating Portable Stimulus Models… Read More
CEO Interview: Srinath Anantharaman of ClioSoft
It will soon be 20 years since ClioSoft started its journey of selling design management software for the semiconductor industry. It was a slow start considering that designs were relatively small and only digital front-end designers had begun to realize the importance of version control and design management. With open source… Read More
Adaptation or Crisis – Will Security Save Technology
The technology landscape is rapidly changing how we interact and live in our world. The variety of Internet of Things is huge and growing at a phenomenal pace. Every kind of device imaginable is becoming ‘smart’ and connected. Entertainment gadgets, industrial sensors, medical devices, household appliances, and personal assistants… Read More
Think your future historical encrypted data is secure? Think again…
It’s been 32 years since the successful sci-fi comedy, Back to the Future, saw 17-year old Marty McFly – played by Michael J. Fox – accidentally travel 30 years back in time to 1955. The film was a box-office smash, as audiences worldwide delighted in McFly’s antics, only to soon realize that the cool kid from the future was jeopardizing… Read More
Could China Take the Lead in Installed 300mm Capacity?
China buys more than half of the semiconductors manufactured in the world and yet only produces less the 10% of their own demand. Recently there have been a lot of announcements out of China about large scale investments in semiconductor manufacturing. The Chinese government for example has announced plans to invest $161 billion… Read More
TSMC Describes Technology Innovation Beyond A14