A couple of recent semiwiki articles reviewed highlights of the annual TSMC Technical Symposium recently held in Santa Clara (links here, here, and here). One of the captivating sessions at every symposium is the status of the Design Enablement for emerging technologies, presented at this year’s event by Suk Lee, Senior… Read More
Streamlining Functional Verification for Multi-Die and Chiplet DesignsAs multi-die and chiplet-based system designs become more…Read More
S2C Advances RISC-V Ecosystem, Accelerating Innovation at 2025 Summit ChinaShanghai, July 19, 2025 — S2C, a leader in functional…Read More
A Quick Tour Through Prompt Engineering as it Might Apply to DebugThe immediate appeal of large language models (LLMs)…Read More
What XiangShan Got Right—And What It Didn’t Dare TryAn Open ISA, a Closed Mindset — Predictive…Read More
Webinar: Chip-Package-System Design for ADAS
When thinking of ADAS from an embedded system perspective, it is tempting to imagine that system can be designed to some agreed margins without needing to worry too much about the details of the car environment and larger environment outside the car. But that’s no longer practical (or acceptable) for ADAS or autonomous systems.… Read More
The Driver in the Driverless Car
What is the likelihood that the people building Uber’s self-driving technologies did not know that their software was highly imperfect and could endanger lives if the cars were let loose on public streets? Or that employees of Theranos did not know that their equipment would produce inaccurate diagnostics?
San Francisco has … Read More
The Fate of Autonomous
The latest installment in the “Fast and Furious” franchise will debut bringing the concept of remote control of cars into the mainstream. Suffice it to say that remote control plays a major role in the script.
This will only be the latest chapter of a long-running effort to demonize autonomous vehicle technology in… Read More
14nm 16nm 10nm and 7nm – What we know now
Last week Intel held a manufacturing day where they revealed a lot of information about their 10nm process for the first time and information on competitor processes continues to slowly come out as well. I thought it would be useful to summarize what we know now, especially since some of what Intel announced was different than what… Read More
The Rise of Transaction-Based Emulation
One serious challenge to the early promise of accelerating verification through emulation was that, while in theory the emulator could run very fast, options for driving and responding to that fast model were less than ideal. You could use in-circuit emulation (ICE), connecting the emulation to real hardware and allowing you… Read More
Machine Learning Accelerates Library Characterization by 50 Percent!
Standard cell, memory, and I/O library characterization is a necessary, but time-consuming, resource intensive, and error-prone process. With the added complexity of advanced and low power manufacturing processes, fast and accurate statistical and non-statistical characterization is challenging, creating the need … Read More
Integrated Photonics Accelerates with Entrance of TSMC and TowerJazz Foundries
I’m writing this from the Boston airport on my way home from four straight weeks of PIC (photonic integrated circuit) related travel. It’s been a grueling but very rewarding four weeks and the big take away from this month is that there are now many more signs in the market that integrated photonics is reaching a real tipping point.… Read More
When Will we Replace the 3.5 mm Jack in Modern Phones?
You have certainly experienced that modern mobile phones are used for more than phone calls and do not have room for multiple connectors. A new approach for audio connectivity is needed, allowing product designers to retire the 3.5mm jack. Considering the USB audio protocol to replace the analog audio solutions, typically using… Read More
When Once is Not Enough, But Unlimited is Too Much
When people think about non volatile memory, the first thing that usually comes to mind is NAND flash like that used in SSD’s or in microcontrollers to hold on-board code. Of course, there is also EEPROM and other types of NVM as well that can be used to hold data and code for the multitude of connected devices that are so common now. For… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?