Talking with actual IC designers is always fascinating to me, because these engineers are the unsung heroes that enable our modern day world of consumer and industrial electronics. Too often we only hear from the CEO or other C-level executives in the press about their own companies, products, services and vision. I recently had… Read More




Tool Trends Highlight an Industry Trend for AMS designs
Archaeologists often use tools found in digs as a major indicator of trends in civilizations. The same could be said for trends in design, though we don’t have to reconstruct these design trends – we tend to see them ahead of us.
The trend in this case is the growing importance of sensors in designs and there’s no better example of that… Read More
Netspeed Gemini NoC Provides Coherent Fabric in Mobileye’s Next-generation EyeQ5 SoC
Last week I wrote about NetSpeed’s network on chip (NoC) IP technology and design environment NocStudio. This week we see a real life application of this technology announced at CES by Imagination Technologies and NetSpeed. The companies have announced that Mobileye will use Imagination and NetSpeed IP in their next-generation… Read More
Analog Bits and TSMC!
As a long time semiconductor IP professional I can tell you for a fact that it is one of the most challenging segments of semiconductor design. Given the growing criticality of semiconductor IP, the challenges of being a leading edge IP provider are increasing and may be at a breaking point. The question now is: What does it take to … Read More
Industrial IoT (IIoT) – Beyond Silicon Valley
Industry 4.0, Smart Factory 1.0, and Internet of Manufacturing are industry initiatives aimed at accelerating the Industrial IoT. With current market forecast exceeding $40 billion and projected to approach $100 billion by 2020, IIoT has everyone’s attention. Well, almost everyone. Turning volumes of factory data into actionable… Read More
CES: Carnival Corp Personifies Key to Monetizing IoT
When one thinks of CES, one typically thinks of the latest in virtual reality or huge super high resolution televisions, sophisticated drones and robots. However, what caught my eye this year came from a company you don’t typically associate with high tech gadgets and that was Carnival Corporation. Yep, the company with all of … Read More
NVIDIA on a Tear at CES
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, gave the opening keynote at CES this year. That’s hardly surprising. From a company that operated on the fringes of mainstream awareness (those guys that do gamer graphics), they finished 2016 as the top-performing company in the S&P 500, returning revenue growth of 35% (forecast). That’s startup… Read More
Intelligent Vision in (almost) Every Application
Let’s take a look at the tremendous penetration of intelligent vision in so many and various applications. A few years ago, computer vision algorithms were implemented in applications directly linked with imaging, like computational photography for smartphones and cameras. We can mention today a bunch of segments like automotive,… Read More
CES 2017, Semiconductors and Cycling
It’s back, that giant consumer electronics trade show CES 2017, held every January in Las Vegas with too many new product introductions to mention in one blog, so I’ll take a more focused look at what’s new for cycling.
Smart Bike
We all know what a smart phone is, but what could a smart bike be? The Chinese company… Read More
Tesla’s (and Uber’s) Teflon to be Tested in 2017
For the past two years the impression has been spreading that Tesla Motors can do no wrong. (I can’t really say the same for Uber after the recent San Francisco licensing debacle.) There is no question that Tesla’s legal department is growing by the month as fights persist over opening stores and forestalling liability… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?