This is the first of an occasional series of articles on the semiconductor industry. Many column inches have covered industry consolidation and in this first article, I aim to explain how the industry reached this point. Later articles will cover subjects including China, joint ventures, emerging players like Brazil and Vietnam,… Read More
Streamlining Functional Verification for Multi-Die and Chiplet DesignsAs multi-die and chiplet-based system designs become more…Read More
S2C Advances RISC-V Ecosystem, Accelerating Innovation at 2025 Summit ChinaShanghai, July 19, 2025 — S2C, a leader in functional…Read More
Samtec Practical Cable Management for High-Data-Rate SystemsIn high-data-rate (HDR) architectures, where signals traverse tens…Read More
A Quick Tour Through Prompt Engineering as it Might Apply to DebugThe immediate appeal of large language models (LLMs)…Read More
The Young and the Restless, PDA vs EDA, Photonic Soaps continued…
If you’ve followed my last article, The Guiding Light and Other Photonic Soaps, you read my comments about the use of waveguides to “guide the light” in photonic integrated circuits (PICs). This article continues the soap opera theme, this time with the Young and the Restless. My point here is that I am continually struck by the dichotomies… Read More
Because that is where the SoC power is
Still thinking of Sonics as just a network-on-chip company? They are pivoting to become an SoC realization company, and in their seminar at #53DAC in Austin we saw an entirely new plan focused on heisting an extremely valuable commodity everyone else is missing.… Read More
IoT Tutorial: Chapter 5 – IoT Clouds and Semantic Interoperability
Semantic Interoperability of IoT Data Streams: In the previous chapter of the IoT tutorial we introduced the concept of IoT and cloud computing convergence, while presenting concrete examples of IoT/cloud infrastructures, such as popular public IoT clouds (Xively.com, Thingspeak.com). These infrastructures enable the… Read More
IoT Tutorial: Chapter 4 – Internet of Things in the Clouds
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
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?