It’s not easy having to deliver one of the last tutorials on the last day of a conference. Synopsys drew that short straw for their tutorial on formal methodologies at DVCon this year. Despite that they delivered an impressive performance, keeping the attention of 60 attendees who said afterwards it was excellent on technical content,… Read More





Seven Reasons to Use FPGA Prototyping for ASIC Designs
Using an FPGA to prototype your next hardware design is a familiar concept, extending all the way back to the time that the first FPGAs were being produced by Xilinx and Altera. There are multiple competitors in the marketplace for FPGA prototyping, so I wanted to discern more about what the German-based company PRO DESIGN had to … Read More
eFabless Design Challenge Results!
Will community engineering work for semiconductors? Will anyone show up? Well, the efabless design challenge is complete and the results are both interesting and encouraging, absolutely!
Efabless completed its low power voltage reference IP design challenge on Monday, March 13. This was a very interesting event that we followed… Read More
Who knew designing PLL’s was so complicated?
Well it comes as no surprise to those that use and design them, that PLL’s are a world unto themselves and very complicated indeed. With PLL’s we are talking about analog designs that rely on ring oscillators or LC tanks. They are needed on legacy nodes, like the ones that IoT chips are based on, and they are crucial for high speed advanced… Read More
Virtual Modeling Drives Auto Systems TTM
The electronics market for automotive applications is distinguished by multiple factors. This is a very fast growing market – electronics now account for 40% of a car’s cost, up from 20% just 10 years ago. New technologies are gaining acceptance, for greener and safer operation and for a more satisfying consumer experience. Platforms… Read More
Talking Cars, Quiet Qualcomm
Qualcomm is a technology titan standing astride both the automotive and wireless industries with 10’s of thousands of patents, 340M automotive-grade chipsets shipped and a leading position in the connected car industry. So it is fascinating to find executives at the company almost totally tongue-tied of late when it … Read More
Mobileye’s Revenge
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has famously dismissed hydrogen fuel (“fool”) cells and LiDAR and even parted company with Mobileye over automated driving strategy. Now it appears that Mobileye has gotten a measure of revenge with broad implications for the automotive industry, Tesla Motors and automated driving.… Read More
China to become largest semiconductor producer
China has long been the largest market for semiconductors, accounting for over 50% of the global market for the last five years. China is now on track to become the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the next few years. The chart below shows China’s integrated circuit (IC) industry from 2010 to 2016, according to the China Semiconductor… Read More
ARMing AI/ML
There is huge momentum building behind AI, machine learning (ML) and deep learning; unsurprisingly ARM has been busy preparing their own contribution to this space. They announced this week a new multi-core micro-architecture called DynamIQ, covering all Cortex-A processors, whose purpose is in their words, “to redefine … Read More
How to Design a Custom SoC with Analog, webinar from ARM and Tanner EDA
Leading edge SoC designs can contain billions of transistors, cost over $10M to design, and take over 18 months to deliver, but not all SoCs require that much complexity, cost and time. In fact, there is a growing class of SoC designs that integrate the popular ARM Cortex-M0 processor along with analog blocks that work with sensors… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet