The advent of cloud computing has acted as a catalyst for the development and deployment of scalable Internet-of-Things business models and applications. Therefore, IoT and cloud are nowadays two very closely affiliated future internet technologies, which go hand-in-hand in non-trivial IoT deployments. Furthermore, most… Read More




Is the Intel Cash Cow in Danger?
There was an interesting panel at the Silicon Summit sponsored by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) on “Designing for the Cloud.” It was led by Linley Gwennap (The Linley Group) with Ivo Bolsons (Xilinx), Ian Ferguson (ARM), and Steve Pawloski (Micron). Missing of course was Intel which derives close to 30% of its revenue… Read More
Is the U.S. ready to adopt a new financial model to support microelectronics?
Amidst all the active news about new process introductions at 16/14/10/7nm and the status of next-generation lithography development, there was a recent press release that could have as large an impact upon the microelectronics industry in the United States. A groundbreaking ceremony was recently held in Marcy, New York for… Read More
Climbing the Infinite Verification Mountain
Many years ago I read a great little book by Rudy Rucker called “Infinity and the Mind”. This book attempts to explain the many classes of mathematical infinity (cardinals) to non-specialists. As he gets to the more abstract levels of infinity, the author has to resort to an analogy to give a feel for extendible and other cardinal … Read More
Webinar alert – another break in the memory wall
A couple months ago we heard from another vendor in a webinar on HBM and breaking through the “memory wall”. Next week Open Silicon weighs in on the topic in a webinar with partners SK Hynix and Synopsys.… Read More
Top Ten #53DAC Highlights
Here is a very subjective list of the Top 10 logistical and technical highlights from DAC’53.
(10) With DAC attendance down from its peak days, the Austin Convention Center served as an excellent venue. There was good participation from companies with design centers in the “Silicon Hills”. And, I saw colleagues from Silicon Valley,… Read More
The Evolution of Emulation
Mentor hosted a panel on emulation in their booth at DAC this year. One thing I really liked about this panel is that it didn’t include anyone from Mentor. Not that I have anything against Mentor employees, who are a fine bunch of people from those I know, but I find panels most interesting when the discussion is purely among customers.… Read More
Six Reasons to Rethink Power Semiconductor Packaging
In my 40 years’ experience in power semiconductors I have visited thousands of customers, big and small, on every continent except Antarctica. When the issue invariably turns to the packaging of the power semiconductor – transistor, diode, or integrated circuit – the requests for improvement fall into six categories:
… Read More
3 reasons why diode-based ESD protection ruins the IoT experience
The ‘Dual diode’ approach is one of the most used on-chip and off-chip concept for ESD protection of IO interfaces. It is simple to implement, smaller than any other IO/ESD concept, has a low parasitic capacitance and low leakage.… Read More
New NVIDIA Tesla M10 Could Drive Enterprise VDI Reassessment
NVIDIA is well known for its leadership in graphics processors (GPUs) for gaming, but their business is quickly diversifying with significant growth in other areas like their datacenter and automotive businesses. Within the datacenter, NVIDIA has been evangelizing a vision for a number of years about the benefits of GPUs for… Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?