Banner 800x100 0810

Xilinx vs Altera Update 2017

Xilinx vs Altera Update 2017
by Daniel Nenni on 02-15-2017 at 7:00 am

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

Making Functional Simulation Faster with a Parallel Approach
by Daniel Payne on 02-14-2017 at 12:00 pm

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

The Next Big Thing in Deep Learning
by Bernard Murphy on 02-14-2017 at 7:00 am

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


Qorvo Uses ClioSoft to Bring Design Data Management to RF Design

Qorvo Uses ClioSoft to Bring Design Data Management to RF Design
by Mitch Heins on 02-13-2017 at 12:00 pm

A couple weeks ago I gave a heads-up about a webinar that was being hosted by ClioSoft, Qorvo and Keysight. The topic of the webinar was how to manage custom RF designs across multiple design teams and CAD flows. The webinar was held on February 1st and included presentations by Marcus Ray of Qorvo and Michele Azarian of Keysight.

Much… Read More


CEO Interview: Amit Gupta of Solido Design

CEO Interview: Amit Gupta of Solido Design
by Daniel Nenni on 02-13-2017 at 7:00 am

Solido Design Automation is rapidly making a name for itself in EDA. Amit Gupta is founder and CEO of Solido Design Automation, based in Saskatoon, Canada. You should also know that Solido is one of the founding members of SemiWiki.com. In the last six years we have published 44 Solido related blogs that have racked up more than 200,000… Read More


DVCon San Jose February 27th – March 2nd

DVCon San Jose February 27th – March 2nd
by Bernard Murphy on 02-10-2017 at 7:00 am

DVCon is fast approaching, less than 3 weeks away. As a verification geek, this must be one of my favorite conferences, so I’ll be there; you’ll see me at tutorials, presentations and wandering around the Exhibit hall. (Pictures here from the 2016 DVCon – many of the same attendees will be at this year’s conference after all :cool:)… Read More


GlobalFoundries Makes Pure-Play Foundry Great Again!

GlobalFoundries Makes Pure-Play Foundry Great Again!
by Daniel Nenni on 02-09-2017 at 9:00 pm

The pure-play foundry business just got stronger and so did semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. As we all know, the fabless semiconductor industry started by utilizing extra capacity from traditional semiconductor manufacturers (IDMs). However, putting your designs in the hands of a competitor is not a good … Read More


Intel Alternative Facts!

Intel Alternative Facts!
by Robert Maire on 02-09-2017 at 12:00 pm

Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, announced a $7B investment in Fab 42 in Arizona in the oval office, next to Trump as evidence of a positive reaction to Trump’s new policies.

Alternative fact;
Paul Otellini, then Intel’s CEO, made a similar promise about Fab 42 in the company of Obama in 2011, during a visit to Hillsboro,… Read More


Notes from the Neural Edge

Notes from the Neural Edge
by Bernard Murphy on 02-09-2017 at 7:00 am

Cadence recently hosted a summit on embedded neural nets, the second in a series for them. This isn’t a Cadence pitch but it is noteworthy that Cadence is leading a discussion on a topic which is arguably the hottest in tech today, with this range and expertise of speakers (Stanford, Berkeley, ex-Baidu, Deepscale, Cadence… Read More


FPGA Design Gets Real

FPGA Design Gets Real
by Tom Simon on 02-08-2017 at 12:00 pm

FPGA’s have become an important part of system design. It’s a far cry from how FPGA’s started out – as glue logic between discrete logic devices in the early days of electronic design. Modern day FPGA’s are practically SOC’s in their own right. Frequently they come with embedded processor cores, sophisticated IO cells, DSP,… Read More