Five or ten years ago it would have been hard to imagine someone from Ford Motors giving the keynote at a technology summit at a major EDA company like Synopsys. However, on November 2[SUP]nd[/SUP], Synopsys hosted a seminar on the topic of Automotive Architecture Design and System Testing, and Ford Technical Fellow Jim Buczkowski… Read More




IC Design Management: Build or Buy?
When I first started doing circuit design with Intel at the transistor level back in the late 1970’s we had exactly two EDA tools at our disposal: an internally developed SPICE circuit simulator, and a commercial IC layout system. Over the years at Intel the internal CAD group added many more automation tools: gate level simulator,… Read More
Ada in the IoT?
For the great majority (I assume) of my audience, if you think about Ada at all, you probably think about military and aerospace applications. Using Ada in the IoT might seem like overkill – cumbersome, over-powered and entirely unnecessary. Or so I thought until I talked to Quentin Ochem of Adacore at ARM TechCon.
For those of you… Read More
FPGAs allow customization of SEU mitigation
Teams working on avionics, space-based electronics, weapons delivery systems, nuclear generating plants, medical imaging equipment, and other applications where radiation leads to single-event upsets (SEU) are already sensitive to functional safety requirements. What about automotive applications?
With electronic… Read More
Can Huawei Shift From Carrier Leader To Global Cloud Player?
Huawei Technologies is a large, $60B China-based company that, while many in the U.S. may not be familiar with, is a very big name in the carrier and telco equipment and consumer smartphone space—especially in China and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). The company is making serious moves to expand their reach into the carrier… Read More
Improving on EMACS for VHDL Creation
OK – I admit I titled this piece as clickbait. There is a core of designers for whom belief in the supremacy of EMACS for RTL creation comes close to religion. Some will read only the title and jump immediately to penning searing comments questioning my intelligence, experience, parenthood and ability to tie my own shoes. Some, I hope,… Read More
5 of the Top 20 Semiconductor Suppliers to Show Double-Digit Gains in 2016!
Semiconductor Market Researcher IC Insights released an update to the 2016 semiconductor sales forecast which is interesting on many different levels. It really has been an exciting year for the semiconductor industry, absolutely. Two of the stars of this year’s report happen to be two of my favorite fabless companies, Nvidia… Read More
IoT Standardization and Implementation Challenges
The rapid evolution of the #IoT market has caused an explosion in the number and variety of IoT solutions. Additionally, large amounts of funding are being deployed at IoT startups. Consequently, the focus of the industry has been on manufacturing and producing the right types of hardware to enable those solutions. In current … Read More
Quality in Hard IP
I was CTO at Atrenta, home of SpyGlass, for many years before the company was acquired by Synopsys, so I know a thing or two about IP quality, to paraphrase a popular commercial. The problem is that even in the best-run IP shops, errors happen. Sometimes they happen on simple changes, especially when you think “This IP has been very … Read More
Tech Industry Analyst Notes On Apple Event
I attended Apple’s special event at the Bill Graham Civic Center in San Francisco and wanted to share with you some of my thoughts and highlights that came out of the event:… Read More
TSMC Describes Technology Innovation Beyond A14