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
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
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
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
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
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)
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
CEO Interview: Simon Butler of Methodics
It has been interesting to watch Methodics transform from an EDA company with their VersIC design management product to Life Cycle Management with ProjectIC, and now a Systems Company with WarpStor. Methodics was founded in 2006 by 2 ex-Cadence experts in the Custom IC design tools space, Simon Butler and Fergus Slorach. Today… Read More
Foundry is Majority of KLAC Business!
As we had projected, with KLA having the highest exposure to foundry/logic of any tool company, they are seeing the most near term strength as foundries (read that as TSMC) spend big for 10NM and 7NM. In addition the first tools you buy are yield management/metrology tools which KLA is the king of.
KLA put up numbers well above estimates….Generating… Read More
Foundry CAPEX Jumped from 17% to 37% of LAM Business
Lam- in line qtr but guides above street over near term. As with ASML, foundry is driver with subdued memory, The Math implies biz peaking-Looking for DRAM in 2017.
Lam reported another great, record quarter, more or less in line with expectations with revenues coming in at $1.632B and shipments of $1.708B, generating EPS of $1.81.… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?