Last week I presented at the 3D ASIP EDA Tutorial and attended the Conference. In previous years, leading edge papers were presented from large companies pushing a solution to meet their needs. These companies had the resources and clout to achieve some astounding successes, but the lingering question was: “what other product… Read More
Think Quantum Computing is Hype? Mastercard Begs to DisagreeJust got an opportunity to write a blog…Read More
TSMC Kumamoto: Pioneering Japan's Semiconductor RevivalIn the lush landscapes of Kumamoto Prefecture, on…Read More
Memory Matters: The State of Embedded NVM (eNVM) 2025Make a difference and take this short survey.…Read More
5 Lessons the Semiconductor Industry Can Learn from GamingBy Kamal Khan The semiconductor world has always…Read MoreNetworking through Dark Silicon Power Islands
For decades, tracing back to the days of Deming, the way to tackle complex engineering problems has been the pareto chart. Charting conditions and their contribution to the problem leads to mitigation priorities.
In the case of SoC power management, the old school pareto chart said the processor core was the biggest power hog and… Read More
Self-driving Connected Taxis Insights from Patents
Japanese company Robot Taxi Inc. announced that it will start trials with self-driving taxi service beginning in 2016. US20150339928 illustrates the system for operating the autonomous vehicles taxi service. A user can request a taxi service using an application that is running on the user’s mobile device. The taxi service… Read More
Micron Misses (MU) – No surprise – Needs focus on NAND/XPoint not diving DRAM
We are surprised that everyone is surprised at DRAM, DRAM oversupply/weak demand is systemic so Micron needs to focus on NAND/XPoint.We find it somewhat amusing that many “analysts” were caught off guard about the weakness in Microns results and poor guidance. Why would you think DRAM would be OK???…Have … Read More
Connections to Internet Drives Semiconductors
We are going to see a big reversal in what connects to the internet in next five years. At the start of this century there were about 488 million internet connections; 85% of those were connected to people for web browsing, e-mails, on-line services etc. and only 15% were used for embedded systems, remote sensing and control, and M2M… Read More
DSP gives Project Tango a power dip
Google’s Project Tango is a prime example of a sophisticated application pushing the boundaries of what is possible within the power envelope of a mobile device. Its objective is to combine 3D motion tracking with depth sensing to understand how a device is moving and gauge its surroundings precisely.… Read More
The "Great Acceleration"
The “Great Acceleration” is upon us. On all fronts technology in everything is advancing at an ever accelerating rate due to improvements in education/training, increased power and functionality of hardware, software, access to information(Google, technical publications, etc.) prototyping techniques (3D… Read More
A Synergistic Chip-Package-System Analysis Methodology
Looking back, 2015 was a significant year for mergers and acquisitions in the EDA industry. The Semiwiki team maintains a chronology of major transactions here.
As I was reviewing this compendium, one of the entries that stands out is the acquisition of Apache Design Solutions by Ansys, Inc. a couple of years ago.
At that time, there… Read More
Leveraging HLS/HLV Flow for ASIC Design Productivity
Imagine how semiconductor design sizes leapt higher with automation in digital design, which started from standard hardware languages like Verilog and VHDL; analog design automation is still catching up. However, it was not without a significant effort put in moving designers from entering schematics to writing RTL, which… Read More
HDCP 2.2, Root of Trust, Industry’s First SHA-3 Security IP from Synopsys
Did you know that by 2020 90% of cars will be connected to Internet? Great, but today, there are already more than 100 car models affected with security flaws (Source: theguardian.com, 2015). That 320 apps are installed on average smartphone device? It would be a complete success, but 43% of Android devices allow installation of… Read More



EDA Has a Value Capture Problem — An Outsider’s View