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Mentor Safe Program Rounds Out Automotive Position

Mentor Safe Program Rounds Out Automotive Position
by Bernard Murphy on 01-24-2017 at 7:00 am

Mentor has an especially strong position in the automotive space given their broad span of embedded, SoC, mechanical and thermal and system design tools. Of course, these days demonstrating ISO 26262 compliance is mandatory for semiconductor and systems suppliers, so EDA vendors need to play their part to support those suppliers… Read More


Qorvo and KeySight to Present on Managing Collaboration for Multi-site, Multi-vendor RF Design

Qorvo and KeySight to Present on Managing Collaboration for Multi-site, Multi-vendor RF Design
by Mitch Heins on 01-23-2017 at 12:00 pm

Over the last several weeks I’ve been having a lot of discussions with colleagues around IP reuse and design data management. This led me to a discussion with Ranjit Adhikary, Marketing Vice President for ClioSoft.

ClioSoft is best known for their design collaboration software platform called SOS. They also sell an enterprise… Read More


DARPA Flex Logix and TSMC!

DARPA Flex Logix and TSMC!
by Daniel Nenni on 01-23-2017 at 10:00 am

When I first saw emerging semiconductor IP company Flex Logix actively involved with TSMC I knew something big was coming and boy was I right. DARPA announced today that an agreement is in place with Flex Logix to develop EFLX eFPGA technology on TSMC 16FFC for use by companies or Government agencies designing chips for the US Government.… Read More


Technology Update With Andrew Faulkner and Jim Lipman of Sidense

Technology Update With Andrew Faulkner and Jim Lipman of Sidense
by Daniel Nenni on 01-23-2017 at 7:00 am

Sidense is an interesting company in a very important market segment. Sidense was founded in 2004 and their 1T-OTP memory macros are now used in hundreds of chips from 180nm to 16nm for code storage, secure encryption keys, analog and sensor trimming and calibration, ID tags, and chip and processor configuration.

If you are designing… Read More


Another Interesting Thing From TSMC!

Another Interesting Thing From TSMC!
by Daniel Nenni on 01-21-2017 at 7:00 am

As I mentioned in my previous post, the TSMC investor call this month was very interesting and Morris Chang was in fine form during the Q&A. As a semiconductor professional I think some of the questions are ridiculous but maybe they have value to the financial people. This one question from Randy, who I think is very astute, is … Read More


TCAD Simulation of Organic Optoelectronic Devices

TCAD Simulation of Organic Optoelectronic Devices
by Daniel Payne on 01-20-2017 at 4:00 pm

In my office there are plenty of LED displays for me to look at throughout the day: three 24″ displays from Viewsonic, a 15″ display from Apple, an iPad, a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, a Nexus tablet, a Garmin 520 bike computer, and a temperature display. LED and OLED displays are ubiquitous in all sorts of consumer electronics,… Read More


Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing Gets Boost from Mentor TSMC Collaboration

Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing Gets Boost from Mentor TSMC Collaboration
by Mitch Heins on 01-20-2017 at 12:00 pm

I caught up with John Ferguson of Mentor Graphics this week to learn more about a recent announcement that TSMC has extended its collaboration with Mentor in the area of Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing (FOWLP).

In March of last year Mentor and TSMC announced that they were collaborating on a design and verification flow for TSMC’s… Read More


Adversarial Machine Learning

Adversarial Machine Learning
by Bernard Murphy on 01-20-2017 at 7:00 am

It had to happen. We’ve read about hacking deep learning / machine learning, so now there is a discipline emerging around studying and defending against potential attacks. Of course, the nature of attacks isn’t the same; you can’t really write an algorithmic attack against a non-algorithmic analysis (or at least a non-standard… Read More


Missteps in Securing Autonomous Vehicles

Missteps in Securing Autonomous Vehicles
by Matthew Rosenquist on 01-19-2017 at 12:00 pm

Recently an autonomous car company highlighted some plans to keep their vehicles safe from hacking. Yet their plans won’t actually make them secure. Such gaffs highlight issues across many different industries where cybersecurity is not sufficiently understood by manufacturers to deliver products hardened against attack.… Read More


IP development strategy and hockey

IP development strategy and hockey
by Tom Dillinger on 01-19-2017 at 7:00 am

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One of the greatest hockey players of all time, Wayne Gretzky, provided a quote that has also been applied to the business world — “I skate to where the puck will be, not to where it has been.” It strikes me that this philosophy directly applies to IP development, as well. Engineering firms providing IP must anticipate… Read More