In my world of semiconductors, dark silicon refers to transistors that are present in the chip but that can not be turned on due to thermal constraints. A valid resource that is available but not used. In the case of #IoT we have a lot of data already out there that I would label as dark data, it exists but no one outside the network owner… Read More




Hack This? Making Software a Moving Target
It sometimes seems that the black hats are always one step ahead of the white hats in the never-ending security game. One of the especially invidious ways hackers have found to evade detection is through mutation – changing the code in a virus on each copy, defeating classical signature detection methods and potentially requiring… Read More
It’s Better than SUPREM for 3D TCAD
Process and device engineers have a tough task to model and simulate an IC process prior to fabricating silicon, however this approach is much better than the alternative choice in the 1970’s of just running multiple lots of wafers and then making measurements to see if your node was meeting specifications. Out of Stanford… Read More
The Future of FPGA Prototyping!
This interview originally appeared as the foreword to our book “Prototypical: The Emergence of FPGA-based Prototyping for SoC Design” but I thought it would be worth publishing for those of you who have not downloaded it yet. I also wanted to mention that our friends at S2C are currently offering a 50% discount on the… Read More
It’s Apple TomTom Time Again
It’s December and time for the annual Apple-should-buy-TomTom rant. Of course, we know Apple prefers younger, smaller companies with brighter and clearer long-term prospects, but we also know Apple navigation sucks and if there is one thing TomTom does well it’s navigation… and traffic.
To stir the pot, … Read More
How The Snapdragon X50, World’s First 5G Modem, Puts Qualcomm Ahead Of The Curve
Regardless of what part of technology you come from, the entire tech industry has been talking about 5G. 5G will reshape the way we will use mobile devices, deliver self-driving cars and smart cities, and even the way get content delivered to our homes. Some companies talk about it to be part of the conversation, while others lead … Read More
CEO Interview: Randy Caplan of Silicon Creations
For the next installment in our series of semiconductor CEO interviews we meet with Randy Caplan from Silicon Creations. Randy has helped build the company from a small startup to one of the world’s leading providers of interface and clocking IP. Almost every new chip developed these days has a requirement for PLLs and SerDes. Since… Read More
Heads Up! Photonics West is Just Around the Corner
As I write about integrated photonics I continue to hear from long-time experts in the field who lament that integrated photonics has been around for decades and other than telecom/datacom, it seems to never be a mainstream technology. It’s hard to argue that this time around it will be different as those people have lived through… Read More
The post election Semicap bubble just burst in one day
Back to a more normal reality… Market gets”De-Fanged”… Where to from here? The “Icarus” Effect… Much of the market, and especially Tech & “FANG” (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix & Google) stocks gave back most all of their post election day gains in one session.… Read More
Scalability of Industrial IoT applications
Industrial IoT applications typically start with a small scale pilot application to demonstrate how some items of equipment and their related sensors can be connected to the cloud and to understand what algorithms are required to automatically extract value from the arriving streams of measurement data. Following on from a … Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?