Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog implicating the insurance industry in the high level of highway fatalities in the U.S. As part of that blog (“The Insurance Industry Has Blood on Its Hands”) I suggested that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ought to look into developing a fatality-reduction… Read More



Is Your Next Reality Going to be Augmented?
John Lennon reportedly once said “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination…” and now we have the technology to do something about making our reality a lot more imaginative. Unless you have been living under a rock (and there is nothing wrong with that – I just haven’t found the right rock myself) there is a LOT going on these days in the… Read More
AMD Zen and the Art of Microprocessor Maintenance
AMD is a fantastic company with highly talented people, but for some reason just hasn’t managed to put a winning streak of microprocessor architectures back-to-back. It’s frustrating to watch: they ride like mad to catch up to or even pull slightly ahead of Intel, then fall back in the pack when they have to make an extended pit stop,… Read More
The Role of IP Selection and Integration in First-Time Silicon Success
As IP expert Eric Esteve has written, Semiconductor IP has consistently outgrown the other design enablement segments and will continue to do so. This has been my personal experience as well during my EDA and IP career so we should all know how important Semiconductor IP is. We certainly know how valuable it is with ARM valued at $32B!… Read More
Three Steps for Custom IC Design Migration and Optimization
Popular companies designing smart phones, CPUs, GPUs and Memory components all employ teams of custom IC designers to create the highest performance chips that are as small as possible, and at the lowest costs. How do they go about doing custom IC design migration and optimization when moving from one process node to another one?… Read More
A new world of 10nm design constraints
Every time the industry transitions to a smaller process node IC design software undergoes extensive updates.
I talked to a couple of experts in physical design at Mentor Graphics about what is involved in making place-and-route software ready for a new node. This is what I learned from Sudhakar Jilla, the IC design marketing director… Read More
Millennial Tyranny in the Connected Car
Nielsen’s latest AutoTECHCAST study once again introduces confusion to the connected car debate, but it’s understandable and relates to a demographic gradient around technology. Young people are aware of an interested in so-called “brought-in” technologies, while the majority of (older) people… Read More
I3C Will Support MIPI Pervasion Beyond Mobile: IoT, Wearable, Automotive
MIPI I3C specification Draft Specification is now available to all MIPI Alliance members in First Draft Review, but we can be confident that I3C has been already implemented by some of the members. Before I3C specification, the de facto communication standard for sensors in mobile and consumer applications was I²C, requiring… Read More
Flex Logix validating EFLX on TSMC 40ULP
Flex Logix has been heads-down for the last several months working toward customer implementations of their EFLX reconfigurable RTL IP cores. Today, they’ve announced a family of 10 hard IP cores ready in TSMC 40ULP, and provided an update to their roadmap for us.… Read More
Embedded Product Development – Make vs Buy
Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) face many questions before building any product. After they are convinced that there is a business potential in their new product, next comes the crucial stage of project execution. They aspire to build the product in-time, maybe before the competitors or better than the competing products,… Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?