Elon Musk’s company SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin have grabbed the headlines in the space race, both of them building rockets and spacecraft. But there is fascinating backstory on how this race and the private space industry came into existence. It is the tale of a renegade entrepreneur, Peter Diamandis, who founded the XPRIZE… Read More
Advanced Architectures for Hybrid III-V/Silicon Quantum Cascade LasersMid-infrared (MIR) photonic integrated circuits are emerging as…Read More
Efficient Bump and TSV Planning for Multi-Die Chip DesignsThe semiconductor industry has experienced rapid advancements in…Read More
The Evolution of RISC-V and the Role of Andes Technology in Building a Global EcosystemDuring my frequent trips to Taiwan as a…Read More
Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions CHERI AllianceThe CHERI Alliance is a non-profit organization dedicated…Read More
Operationalizing Secure Semiconductor Collaboration: Safely, Globally, and at ScaleSemiconductor manufacturing is among the most complex industrial…Read MoreNetwork vs. Platform
So, how do we define these terms? What is the core difference? Why does it matter – what is the implication on business models? And finally, which firms today embody these models?
First, the basics. Digital business models are inherently exponential in terms of value generation. Data drives powerful flywheel effect, and these … Read More
Mentor Webinar on Power Exploration for Optimizing Power
There are a lot of clever techniques to automatically find and even implement methods for register gating and memory gating, but the bulk of power-saving still depends on designer and architect insight based on expected range of use of a device, complemented by practical use-case simulations. Of course this team needs to be able… Read More
The Virus of Car Ownership
What if we all looked at driving as less of a right and more of an addiction, a disability, or a disease to be avoided, cured or overcome? What if driving were seen as a menace to society draining lives, money and time from the economy? What would our public policy priorities become in this new context?
Sweden isn’t waiting to find… Read More
The CIA, NSA, and Pokemon Go?
So it’s finally out, the truth about Pokemon Go (and probably the rest of the app based mobile gaming world) and it’s a shocking, painful truth that will pretty much destroy the industry and force people back to their sedentary, solitary lives in front of their computers. And just as the average weight of an American … Read More
Demystifying IoT – The 15 key building blocks of an IoT solution
IoT solution development is complex. In many cases, development entails combining expertise from a number of different areas such as embedded system engineering, connectivity solution design, big data handling, application development, and data encryption techniques. Each area demands a specific array of competences … Read More
RTL Design Restructuring Explained
Modern SoC designs can use billions of transistors where transistors are grouped into gates, then gates grouped into cells, then cells grouped into blocks, blocks grouped into modules, and so on, creating a complex hierarchy. What a front-end designer conceives of logically for a hierarchy will differ from how an optimized physical… Read More
ESL Architectural Power Estimation Support from TSMC — yes, TSMC
Electronic system level (ESL) modeling for system architecture exploration is rapidly gaining momentum. The simulation performance requirements for hardware/software co-design are demanding — an abstract model for SoC IP cores is required. Typically, soft IP will include a number of model configuration parameters.… Read More
Solutions for Variation Analysis at 16nm and Beyond
Variation is still the tough nut to crack for advanced process nodes. The familiar refrain of lower operating voltages and higher performance requirements make process variation an extremely important design consideration. As far back as the early 2000’s design teams have been looking for a better approach to model variation… Read More
3 Small-Team Design Productivity Challenges Managed
“Data management tools? We use small teams doing small designs. Each project only has two or three designers. Everyone uses the same EDA tools. Why do we need another tool for collaboration?” Good question. If you enjoy frequent meetings and redoing work because someone didn’t understand the status of IP blocks, the answers may… Read More


Unraveling Dose Reduction in Metal Oxide Resists via Post-Exposure Bake Environment