When working on an analog design, after initial design specs have been met, it is useful to determine if the design meets specs out to 3 or 4 sigma based on process variation. This can serve as a useful step before going any further. It might not be a coincidence that foundries base their Cpk on 3-sigma. To refresh, Cpk is the ratio of the… Read More
Arteris Highlights a Path to Scalable Multi-Die Systems at the Chiplet SummitAt the recent Chiplet Summit, presentations, discussions and…Read More
Captain America: Can Elon Musk Save America's Chip Manufacturing Industry?Intel has posted three consecutive years of falling…Read More
WEBINAR: Reclaiming Clock Margin at 3nm and BelowAt 3nm and below, clock networks have quietly…Read More
WEBINAR: HBM4E Advances Bandwidth Performance for AI TrainingThe rapid proliferation of LLMs and other AI…Read More
Siemens Wins Best in Show Award at Chiplet Summit and Targets Broad 3D IC Design EnablementThe recent Chiplet Summit in Santa Clara was…Read MoreNeural Networks Leverage New Technology and Mimic Ancient Biological Systems
Neural networks make it possible to use machine learning for a wide variety of tasks, removing the need to write new code for each new task. Neural networks allow computers to use experiential learning instead of explicit programming to make decisions. The basic concepts related to neural networks were first proposed in the 1940’s,… Read More
HLS Rising
No-one could accuse Badru Agarwala, GM of the Mentor/Siemens Calypto Division, of being tentative about high-level synthesis. (HLS). Then again, he and a few others around the industry have been selling this story for quite a while, apparently to a small and not always attentive audience. But times seem to be changing. I’ve written… Read More
China is right: The world doesn’t need Silicon Valley
Ever since the Chinese Government banned Facebook in 2009, Mark Zuckerberg has been making annual trips there attempting to persuade its leaders to let his company back in. He learned Mandarin and jogged through the smog-filled streets of Beijing to show how much he loved the country. Facebook even created new tools to allow China… Read More
2017 Semiconductors +20%, 2018 slower
The global semiconductor market in 2017 will finish with annual growth of about 20%. Recent forecasts range from 19.6% to 22%. World Semiconductor Trades Statistics (WSTS) data is finalized through October, thus the final year results will almost certainly be within this range. We at Semiconductor Intelligence have raised … Read More
IEDM 2017 – Intel Versus GLOBALFOUNDRIES at the Leading Edge
As I have discussed in previous blogs, IEDM is one of the premier conferences to learn about the latest developments in semiconductor technology. … Read More
"The Year of the eFPGA" 2017 Recap
This past January, I had postulated that 2017 would be the “Year of the Embedded FPGA”, as a compelling IP offering for many SoC designs (link). As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be interesting to see how that prediction turned out.
The criteria that would be appropriate metrics include: increasing capital investment;… Read More
Embedded In-chip Monitoring, Webinar Recap
Six years ago I first interviewed Stephen Crosher, CEO and Co-founder of Moortecas they were in startup mode with some new semiconductor IP for temperature sensing, and earlier this month I attended their webinar all about embedded in-chip monitoring to get caught up with their technology and growing success. Ramsay Allen is … Read More
Aldec and High-Performance Computing
Aldec continues to claim a bigger seat at the table, most recently in their attendance at SC17, the supercomputing conference hosted last month in Denver. I’m really not sure how to categorize Aldec now. EDA company seems to miss the mark by a wide margin. Prototyping company? Perhaps, though they have a much stronger focus on end-applications… Read More
Test Compression for Mission Critical SoCs
With the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, Cognitive Computing, and autonomous vehicles and robots we are seeing an unprecedented number of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) going into mission-critical applications. To accomplish the complexity of these applications, SoCs are being manufactured in leading-edge… Read More


Musk’s Orbital Compute Vision: TERAFAB and the End of the Terrestrial Data Center