It is near impossible to read or have a conversation about IoT, without security becoming a major topic. For IT professionals involved with IoT projects, security needs to be a major consideration, starting with planning and design, and continuing all the way through to deployment, implementation, and maintenance. Security… Read More



Mentor Functional Verification Study 2016
Periodically, Mentor commissions a user/usage survey on Functional Verification, conducted by the Wilson Research Group, then they publish the results to all of us, an act of industry good-citizenship for which I think we owe them a round of thanks. Harry Foster at Mentor is breaking down the report into a series of 15 blogs. He’s… Read More
TSMC 16nm, 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm Update!
Word on the street is that TSMC is on schedule with 16FFC, 10nm and 7nm, which is a very big deal for the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. As Scotten Jones has illustrated in the graphic below, for the first time in the history of the semiconductor industry a pure-play foundry (TSMC) will have the process lead over Intel. And this is… Read More
Apple, Google Go Home
For some marketers the operative mantra is go big or go home. It looks like Apple and Google are both taking a harder look at the automotive industry and have decided to go home.
The media is rife with reports of Apple hemorrhaging automotive engineers while senior executives on Google’s automated driving team have been skipping… Read More
Zero Tolerance = Vision Zero
Just returning from Sweden where the highway fatality rate is a marvel of modern transportation policy. Long before Sweden adopted a Vision Zero approach to reducing highway fatalities the country set itself apart from most others with a 0.02 blood alcohol limit for drivers. There is no question that this has contributed significantly… Read More
Can it ever be game over in tech?
The opening line of a recent Benedict Evans piece makes a bold statement: “The smartphone platform wars are pretty much over, and Apple and Google won.” Reading that line reminded me of the William Shatner scene in Airplane 2; let’s just shut it down and go home. That’s not the point Evans is making, however, … Read More
Requirements Management and IP Management Working Together
I first heard about requirements management back in 1995 while marketing a graphic HDL entry tool for an EDA vendor, and it sounded like a very useful automation approach, however our team quickly discovered that there were too many different vendors for requirements management, so there could be no simple way to integrate with… Read More
A Powerful Case for the ARC SEM Processor
Building devices for the IoT has become especially challenging thanks to two conflicting requirements. The device has to be small and ultra-low power in most applications but also in many of those applications it has to provide a high-level of security, especially to defend high-value targets like smart metering, payment terminals,… Read More
SoC FPGAs for IoT Edge Computing
One of the reasons for the explosive growth of IoT is that embedded devices with networking capabilities and sensor interfaces are cheap enough to deploy them at a plethora of locations.
However, network bandwidth is limited. Not only that, but also, the latency of the network can be of seconds or minutes. By the time the sensor data… Read More
How Rapidly the Robots Will Rise
“For car buyers, an end to the days of dickering?” reads the headline across the center of the front page of the Washington Post this morning. No, it’s not an article about new tools to make car buying easier. It’s a story about electric vehicle maker, Tesla Motor’s impact on car retailing.
The article… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption