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
2016 EDA Dead Pool
The most commonly asked question during conference calls with Wall Street of late is in regards to the massive consolidation the semiconductor industry is experiencing. How will the consolidation affect the Foundries? How will the consolidation affect EDA and IP? How will the consolidation affect the semiconductor industry… Read More
My Life at Fairchild Semiconductor – 1979
This week it was announced that Fairchild Semiconductor was sold to On Semiconductor for $2.4B. The end of an era. As I look back at my career of 36 years with the only company that I have worked for since graduating college, I can’t help but feel a bit sad but extremely grateful for the wonderful experience that Fairchild has … Read More
2016 Samsung IoT Smart Home Strategy Perspectives from Patents
Samsung launched the first fully integrated smart home system Samsung SmartThings for providing the home automation and safety services to make people’s daily lives easier, more comfortable and safe. Followings show the insights regarding Samsung strategy perspectives for providing other value added services to make Samsung… Read More
Coming to a Workstation Near You: Accellera’s Portable Stimulus Standard
Portable Stimulus has become such a popular standards topic of late that I thought it would be good to take a break this month from my low power series to bring you, my valued readers, more information about it from one of my colleagues, Dennis Brophy, who is working to help drive development of this standard within Accellera. I’ll … Read More
How to Gain Low-Power at High-Performance
In a world of smart devices, high performance is required in order to address several specific needs such as intelligent and immediate data processing for IoT applications, instant response from mobile devices, highly interactive user interfaces, and so on. Most of these devices are battery operated and hence require lower … Read More
Why Medical IoT Won’t Take Off
In the wave of enthusiasm surrounding the IoT, medical applications are often held up as an obvious and compelling area where applications cannot fail to succeed. I beg to differ. I think there are two important reasons why almost no such applications will succeed, at least not in the way we seem to be approaching them today.
The first… Read More
IoT M&A Target Candidates Insights from Patents
Smart Home Energy Management
Ecofactor provides automated energy savings, comfort and control through energy efficiency, demand response and HVAC performance monitoring services. Ecofactor holds 26 issued US patents including one design patent regarding thermostat. In assessment of the commercial importance (e.g., … Read More
Mentor takes IoT devices to cloud and back
Walking into the Mentor Graphics booth at ARM TechCon, I was greeted by my friends Warren Kurisu and Shay Benchorin. It was good to see them both again. They were poised in front of a table with a Samsung tablet and a small Wi-Fi-ish box, next to a large Samsung printer. The demonstration was similar to a lobby check-in process, where… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki