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Manufacturing Singularity is Comng!

Manufacturing Singularity is Comng!
by Daniel Nenni on 10-27-2016 at 12:00 pm

One of the many benefits of blogging is that you get to meet some very interesting people. This time I had the pleasure of speaking with Michael Ford of Mentor Graphics about Industry 4.0 and smart factories. In fact, Mentor has an excellent series of white papers titled “Is This a Manufacturing Revolution?” from their Valor Division,… Read More


The Ising on the Cake

The Ising on the Cake
by Bernard Murphy on 10-27-2016 at 7:00 am

Just when you thought you knew all the possible foundations for computing, along comes another one. Forget von Neumann, this approach models Ising machines, systems built on solving a statistical ensemble model of ferromagnetism. The concept is quite simple. Imagine a lattice of magnetic dipoles/spins, each of which can only… Read More


Automation for managed system-of-systems design

Automation for managed system-of-systems design
by Don Dingee on 10-26-2016 at 4:00 pm

Anybody who has done any bus & board system design knows the problem. Merchant boards typically have standardized pinouts (after years of haggling in standards organizations) for the backplane bus, and a group of user-defined pins for daughtercard I/O. Homegrown systems usually have a just-as-carefully defined proprietary… Read More


DFT Approaches for Giga-gate SoC Designs

DFT Approaches for Giga-gate SoC Designs
by Daniel Payne on 10-26-2016 at 12:00 pm

In the early days of IC design there were arguments against using any extra transistors or gates for testability purposes, because that would be adding extra silicon area which in turn would drive up the costs of the chip and product. Today we are older and wiser, realizing that there are product pricing benefits to quickly test each… Read More


New Frontiers in the Storage System Market Call for the Best of ICE and Virtual Emulation

New Frontiers in the Storage System Market Call for the Best of ICE and Virtual Emulation
by Richard Pugh on 10-26-2016 at 7:00 am

The storage market has reached what Andy Grove once described as “…a strategic inflection point.”[1] This is the stage in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change.

Changing fundamentals in the storage market—where solid state drives (SSD) are now at the forefront of multiple storage applications,… Read More


2016 semiconductor capex highest in 5 years

2016 semiconductor capex highest in 5 years
by Bill Jewell on 10-25-2016 at 4:00 pm

Global semiconductor capital expenditures (capex) are expected to return to the level of 2011 either this year or next. 2011 was the record year for capex as the industry returned to growth following the 2009-2010 recession. IC Insights’ August 2016 forecast called for 3.5% growth in capital spending to reach $67.1 billion, the… Read More


End-to-End Secure IoT Solutions from ARM

End-to-End Secure IoT Solutions from ARM
by Bernard Murphy on 10-25-2016 at 11:30 am

ARM announced today a comprehensive suite of solutions for IoT support, from IP optimized for applications in this space all the way to cloud-based support to manage edge devices in the field. Their motivation is to provide a faster path to secure IoT, from the chip to the cloud. One especially interesting component of this solution… Read More


Emergence of Segment-Specific DDRn Memory Controller

Emergence of Segment-Specific DDRn Memory Controller
by Eric Esteve on 10-25-2016 at 7:00 am

The semiconductor industry is served today by memory devices supporting various protocols, like DDR4, DDR3, LPDDR4, LPDDR3, GDDR5, HBM, HMC, etc. The trend is clearly to define application specific memory-protocols and in some cases, application specific devices. But developing many, and different, memory controllers … Read More


FPGAs for a few thousand devices more

FPGAs for a few thousand devices more
by Don Dingee on 10-24-2016 at 4:00 pm

An incredibly pervasive trend at last year’s ARM TechCon was the IoT, and I expect this year to bring even more of the same, but with a twist. Where last year was mostly focused on ultra-low power edge devices and the mbed ecosystem, this year is likely to show a better balance of ideas across all three IoT tiers. I also expect a slew of … Read More


Making your AMS Simulators Faster (webinar)

Making your AMS Simulators Faster (webinar)
by Daniel Payne on 10-24-2016 at 12:00 pm

I’ve been following Cadence Design Systems ever since it was formed in 1988 by the merger of SDA Systems and ECAD, Inc. At that time I was working at Silicon Compiler Systems, soon to be acquired by Mentor Graphics. ClioSoft is another company that I’ve known about for several years now, mostly for their design management… Read More