I recently had the opportunity to chat with Anirudh Devgan, senior vice president and general manager at Cadence, who leads the Digital and Signoff Group. We discussed recent product development initiatives at Cadence, and talked about future EDA and semiconductor market opportunities. His insights and comments were keen … Read More





Positive pointers from Samsung, GF, Renesas, NXP/Freescale, ST, Soitec – so will 2016 be the year of FD-SOI?
A little over a month into 2016 and we already have a raft of FD-SOI news from Samsung, GlobalFoundries, NXP/Freescale, Renesas and more. Quite a bit of it came out of the recent SOI Consortium forum in Tokyo. Many of the presentations are now available on the SOI Consortium website (click here to see what’s there) – but keep checking… Read More
Early Structural Reliability Analysis of a Chip-Package-System design is a must!
2015 will be remembered as the year when chip-package-system (CPS) physical co-design and electrical/thermal analysis methodologies took center stage.… Read More
Semiconductor, Oil, and GDP – Correlated? What’s Expected?
In last 3 decades of semiconductor market, the largest growth in IC sales was at 33% in 2010. At that time global recession had started due to financial crisis and in 2009 oil prices fell more than 30%. It appeared that oil prices were negatively correlated with semiconductor market growth. Today again there is another sharp decline… Read More
Smart Phones and the Chinese Marketplace
My first mobile phone was from Motorola and it was fondly called the “brick phone” because of its crude shape. That phone helped me be more efficient while living and working in Silicon Valley, because long commute times in the car were common. At one time Motorola was the best-selling mobile phone brand in the world,… Read More
Quantum Computing – A Quick Review
This topic comes up periodically but for me had always been one of those things I’d get around to understanding better someday. A recent blog in SemiWiki got me looking a little harder and determined to write a blog to get this out of my system, if for no other reason than getting rid of excess tabs on my browser. So here’s my quick review.… Read More
India: Transcending Transportation Transformation
Dr. Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” states that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known and vice versa. Transportation is the same way. The more we study the current state of transportation the less precisely we understand … Read More
Internet of Things : Realizing Business Value through Platforms, Data Analytics & Visualization
Over the past few years of being immersed in the Internet of Things (IoT), I have found that customers have very specific problems they are trying to solve; e.g. gaining energy efficiency, early fault detection or remote diagnosis and maintenance of equipment. Decisions are driven by the need to reduce Operational Expenditure… Read More
Low end LTE UE categories seeing more action
Most of our attention goes toward the higher end of the LTE UE categories – ones designed for moving large amounts of multimedia data from smartphones and tablets concurrently with voice traffic. An equally interesting discussion is taking shape at the low end of the LTE UE categories targeting M2M and IoT devices with power-efficient,… Read More
Sleep Monitoring and Aiding Devices Insight from Patents
US9192326 illustrates a sleep monitoring system that can be embodied within a wearable device or in a mobile device. The system includes an accelerometer to monitor a user’s movements. The system determines when the user is falling asleep into a sleep session based on the user’s movements. The system also identifies… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography