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
Mentor Plays for Keeps in Emulation
EDA has always been a fiercely competitive market, no more so than in emulation where the clash of claims and counter-claims can leave those of us on the sidelines wondering who’s really on top. Sales are the obvious indicator but leadership there flips back and forth between product releases. That makes Mentor’s choice to play … Read More
Four Barriers to Using an SoC for IoT Projects
I often read about the large number of expected IoT design starts around the world, so I started to think about what the barriers are for launching this industry in order to meet the projections. One of my favorite IoT devices is the Garmin Edge 820, a computer for cyclists that has sensors for speed, cadence, power, heart rate, altitude… Read More
Aldec Rounds Out ALINT-PRO Checker
If there’s anyone out there who still doesn’t accept the importance of static RTL verification in the arsenal of functional verification methods, I haven’t met any recently. That wasn’t the case in my early days in this field. Back then I grew used to hearing “I don’t make mistakes in my RTL”, “I’ll catch that in simulation”, “My editor… Read More
Using HSPICE StatEye to Tackle DDR4 Rail Jitter
The world is a risky place, according to Scott Wedge, Principal R&D Engineer at Synopsys, who presented at the Synopsys HSPICE SIG on Feb 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] in Santa Clara. Indeed, the world circuit designers face can be uncertain. Dealing with risk and departure from ideal was a main theme in the fascinating talks at this dinner… Read More
Xilinx vs Altera Update 2017
I truly miss the Xilinx versus Altera war of words (competition at its finest) and competition is what makes the fabless semiconductor ecosystem truly great, absolutely. So with great disappointment I read the Intel Analyst Day transcript published by Bloomberg last week. It is attached at the bottom in case you are interested… Read More
Making Functional Simulation Faster with a Parallel Approach
I’ll never forgot working at Intel on a team designing a graphics chip when we wanted to simulate to ensure proper functionality before tapeout, however because of the long run times it was decided to make a compromise to speed things up by reducing the size of the display window to just 32×32 pixels. Well, when first silicon… Read More
The Next Big Thing in Deep Learning
I mentioned adversarial learning in an earlier blog, used to harden recognition systems against bad actors who could use slightly tweaked images to force significant misidentification of objects. It’s now looking like methods of this nature aren’t just an interesting sidebar on machine learning, they are driving major advances… Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?