Neural nets are hot these days. In this forum certainly you can’t swing a cat without hitting multiple articles on the topic – I’ve written some myself. For me there are two reasons for this interest. First, neural nets are amazingly successful at what they do, for example in image recognition where they can beat… 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 SystemsAccording to a recent Samtec whitepaper, in high-data-rate…Read More
A Quick Tour Through Prompt Engineering as it Might Apply to DebugThe immediate appeal of large language models (LLMs)…Read More
Seven Reasons to Attend DAC in Austin
I’m attending the 53rd Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Austin, Texas starting June 5th, and there are at least seven reasons that you should consider attending as well. For decades now DAC has been the premier place for all the players in our semiconductor ecosystem to get together: Academics, Commercial vendors … Read More
Is the Future Finally Here? What a GaAs!
Back in 1983 I was working for Texas Instruments during the beginning of the push to let common electrical engineers develop their own CMOS application specific ICs (ASICs). This would eventually the be the fuel that fed the semiconductor engine to reach over $335 billion in 2015. At that time, I was a young guy and I had a rascally … Read More
Qualcomm’s New Smartphone Chips Go Straight At MediaTek
Last Thursday at Qualcomm’s Financial Analyst Day the company made a slew of chip announcements ranging from the industry’s 1 Gbps wireless LTE modem to a custom designed smartwatch SoC and platform called “Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC”. In between those, Qualcomm also announced a few very overlooked … Read More
Are Standard Cell Libs, Memories and Mixed-signal IP Availabe at 7nm FF?
More than 500 designers (562) have responded to a survey made in 2015 by Synopsys. Answering to the question “What is the fastest clock speed of your design?” 56% have mentioned a clock higher than 500 MHz (and still 40% higher than 1 GHz). If you compare with the results obtained 10 years ago, the largest proportion of answers was for… Read More
Body-biasing for ARM big or LITTLE in GF 22FDX
GLOBALFOUNDRIES has been evangelizing their 22FDX FD-SOI process for a few months; readers may have seen Tom Simon’s write-up of their preview at ARM TechCon. Dr. Joerg Winkler recently gave an updated webinar presentation of their approach in an implementation of ARM Cortex-A17 core.
By now, you’ve probably heard that 22FDX… Read More
Eight Improvements for PCB Software
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
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?