I first met John Durbetaki at Intel in Aloha, Oregon and we both had a keen interest in the nascent personal computer industry. My first PC was made by Radio Shack and dubbed the TRS-80 which maxed out at 48KB of RAM. I kept watch on Durbetaki as he left Intel and formed his own company OrCAD in 1985 to serve the needs of PC-based CAD software.… Read More




Is Tesla Making Their Own CPUs?
One of the benefits of administering a leading semiconductor design enablement portal is that I get to see the traffic patterns then try and figure out what’s behind them. For example, a Cupertino domain has been reading all of our automotive content very thoroughly. We also get hits by Google.com, Amazon.com, and dozens of other… Read More
BLDC motor control kit targets power savings
We tend to focus on connectivity and sensors for the IoT, however there is a third element to what I call the “Edge Device Triad” that is just as important: actuators. Making things move with microcontrollers (MCUs) is a science in and of itself. For small size and low weight combined with decent mechanical power, designers are opting… Read More
Here’s the advantage that keeps Silicon Valley ahead of the world
A trait shared by the fastest growing and most disruptive companies in history – Google, Amazon, Uber, AirBnb, and eBay – is that they aren’t focused on selling products, they are building platforms. The ability to leverage the network effects of a platform is something that the technology industry learned… Read More
Cadence loads up on MACs for vision with CNNs
For vision DSP IP running convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a big driver of performance is increasing the bits processed per cycle with parallel MACs. Tom Simon did a great job in recent posts of introducing CNNs at a high level, so I’ll look at what is architecturally behind Cadence’s latest announcement: the Tensilica Vision… Read More
How to Deal With Seven Design Closure Issues
The challenge of tracking design progress is a shared problem for individual designers, team leaders, and project managers. At each level the ability to step back from just reviewing error log files and seeing the arc of the whole design as it moves forward is valuable. The difficulty of seeing the whole picture is exacerbated when… Read More
From Simulation to Emulation: 3 Steps to a Portable SystemVerilog/UVM Testbench
If your team is building large, complex designs that require millions of clock cycles to fully verify, you need both simulation and emulation.
Using emulation with simulation accelerates performance for dramatically reduced run times.… Read More
Mind The Gap – Boarding the Silicon Photonics Packaging Train
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on silicon photonics lately and I’ve come to realize that while there is much written on the development of individual silicon photonic components and devices (modulators, photo detectors, optical amplifiers and such) that much of the cost and therefore chances of economic success… Read More
Why Should Companies Care about Internet of Things Services?
As with any new technology, businesses will need to find quantifiable benefits in the Internet of Things before the concept is embraced and implemented. It could be argued that connected devices are already being adopted on a wide scale: companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Qualcomm, IBM, and others already see IoT as a core part … Read More
Semiconductor capital spending slow in 2016
The outlook for semiconductor capital expenditures (capex) in 2016 is weak. Gartner’s January 2016 forecast called for a decline of 4.7%. IC Insights in February projected a 0.8% decline. The table below shows the Gartner forecast along with the capex forecasts from the top three spenders (Intel, Samsung and TSMC) which… Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?