An Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) is essentially a trusted entity established by critical infrastructure owners and operators to share threat data. ISACs first emerged in 1998 when President Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 63, which identified the nation’s critical infrastructure that could… Read More



Magwel’s Current Tools Take an Active Role in Power Transistor Design
It often seems that semiconductor industry coverage focuses on large digital markets like microprocessors or high frequency analog designs for RF applications. Yes, these are large markets, but power transistors like IBGT and VFETS make up a large and crucial sector. Not only do they make their way into discretes, but they are… Read More
mbed Evaluation Boards Showcase Focus on IoT Software, Connectivity
ARM’s mbed operating system is winning attention in the highly fragmented embedded software space by promising a solid software foundation for interoperable hardware and thus scale the Internet of Things (IoT) designs by narrowing the development time.… Read More
Academia and TCAD Grow Closer
On my first trip to Austria for EDA business I traveled by car from Germany, and I couldn’t wait to see how fast we would travel on the fabled Autobahn. Oddly enough it was summertime and the Autobahn was filled with vacationing families driving cars with shiny, aluminum campers in tow, so our car only traveled about 60 mph, nothing… Read More
Advances in DDR IP Solution for High-Performance SoCs
In this era of high-performance, low-power, and low-cost devices coming up at an unprecedented scale, the SoCs can never attain the ultimate in performance; always there is scope for improvement. Several methods including innovative technology, multi-processor architecture, memory, data traffic management for low latency,… Read More
Samsung Versus Intel at 14nm
Daniel Nenni recently blogged about Intel’s claims of industry leading process density that were made at their analysts meeting. It isn’t clear to me why Intel makes this such a big focus at the analysts meetings, they really don’t compete with the foundries much but this seems to be a big deal to them. I thought it would be interesting… Read More
Internet of Things in 2016
2015 was a big year for the Internet of Things (IoT). In our minds, it seems to have been the year nearly all big companies developed an IoT strategy. At the risk of sounding cliche, you could say IoT became mainstream in 2015.… Read More
5 ways FPGA-based prototyping shrinks design time
Engineers are trained to think linearly, along the lines of we started here, then we did this, and that, and this other stuff, and here is where we ended up. If you’ve ever presented in an internal review meeting, sales conference, or a TED-like event, you know that is a dangerous strategy in winning friends and influencing people.… Read More
The Fog Begins to Lift on 5G Cellular
5G mobile communication is widely forecasted to be a market reality seven to ten years from now. As envisioned by the International Telecommunications Union Radiocommunications sector (ITU-R), in their next generation International Mobile Telecommunication or IMT-2020 documents, 5G comprises three top-level goals: enhanced… Read More
An Easier Way to Reach Design Closure for SoC
It’s really challenging to reach design closure of an SoC by meeting timing constraints, staying within the power budget, tracking progress, communicating within the team, minimizing the floorplan, maximizing manufacturability and eliminating hotspots. Most SoC design teams have EDA tools from multiple vendors,… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki