It constantly amazes me at how much FGPA companies like Xilinx have done to bring ARM-based CPUs into a programmable SoC along with FPGA glue logic. Xilinx offers the Zynq 7000 and Zynq UltraScale+ SoCs to systems designers as a way to quickly get their ideas into the marketplace. A side effect of all this programability and flexibility… Read More


Capture the Light with Integrated Photonics
I wrote up a quick article in the weeks before the Design Automation Conference (DAC) letting readers know that Integrated Photonics were indeed coming to DAC again this year. As a follow up, I attended the DAC presentation, ‘Capture the Light. An Integrated Photonics Design Solution from Cadence, Lumerical and PhoeniX Software’,… Read More
Bosch to Build $1.1 Billion Fab for Automotive and IoT!
There has been quite a bit of coverage on this already but Bosch building a fab in Dresden is a big deal so let me share my experience, observation, and opinion as us bloggers do. The $1.1B question of course is: Why didn’t Bosch invest in GlobalFoundries FD-SOI fabs in Dresden instead? Automotive and IoT is perfect for FD-SOI,… Read More
3D NAND Myths and Realities
For many year 2D NAND drove lithography for the semiconductor industry with the smallest printed dimensions and yearly shrinks. As 2D NAND shrunk down to the mid-teens nodes, 16nm, 15nm and even 14nm, the cells became so small that there were only a few electrons in each cell and cross-talk issues made further shrinks very difficult… Read More
Overcoming the Challenges of Creating Custom SoCs for IoT
As the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunities continues to expand, companies are working hard to bring System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions to market in the hopes of garnering market share and revenue. However, it’s not as easy as it may first seem. Companies are running into a series of issues that stand between them and capturing the… Read More
Memories for the Internet
In 1969 the Internet was born at UCLA when a computer there sent a message to a computer at Stanford. By 1975, there were 57 computers on the ‘internet’. Interestingly in the early seventies I actually used the original Xerox Sigma 7 connected to the internet in Boelter Hall at UCLA. A similar vintage computer is now in this room commemorating… Read More
DSRC: The Road to Ridiculous
Stupid has a home and that home is in Macomb County, Michigan. It is here, we learn from The Detroit News, that General Motors Co. has decided to test the use of wireless technology in conjunction with roadside QR code signs to transmit vital traffic information to passing cars. Those messages will only be communicated to cars equipped… Read More
ARM, Infineon, Synopsys, SK Hynix talk AMS Simulation
Every SoC that connects to an analog sensor or device requires AMS (Analog Mixed-Signal) circuit simulation for design and verification, so this year at #54DAC the organizers at Synopsys hosted another informative AMS panel session over lunch time on Monday. What makes this kind of panel so refreshing is that the invited speakers… Read More
TSMC Unveils More Details of Automotive Design Enablement Platform
At this year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC), TSMC unveiled more details about the design enablement platforms that were introduced at their 23[SUP]rd[/SUP] annual TSMC Technology Symposium earlier this year. I attended a presentation on TSMC’s Automotive Enablement Platform held at the Cadence Theater where TSMC’s… Read More
DAC 2017: How Oracle does Reliability Simulation when designing SPARC
Last week at #54DAC there was a talk by Michael Yu from the CAD group of Oracle who discussed how they designed their latest generation of SPARC chips, with an emphasis on the reliability simulations. The three features of the latest SPARC family of chips are:
- Security in silicon
- SQL in silicon
- World’s fastest microprocessor
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment