A tremendous froth of press and promotion has arisen in the last year concerning the Internet of Things. Nearly every High Tech firm on the globe has begun to advertise their offerings as an integral part of it, positioning their products and services as both essential to the IoT and as a vital component of its future. As the smartphone… Read More
Cliff Hou at TSMC OIP
I attended Cliff Hou’s keynote at TSMC OIP Forum earlier this month. OIP is a huge undertaking. It currently has over 100 ecosystem partners, 10 technology generations, 7600+ IPs, 60+ EDA tools, 7000+ tech files and 150+ PDKs.
Most of Cliff’s presentation gave details on where TSMC are with the various processes. … Read More
3 reasons to focus on hardware dependent software
Why is software for modern SoCs so blasted expensive to develop? One reason is more software is being developed at the kernel layer – hardware dependent software, or HdS. Application software often assumes the underlying hardware, operating system, communication stacks, and device drivers are stable. For HdS, this flawed assumption… Read More
Sensing, Processing and Connecting: IoT Fundamentals
Internet of Things, or Internet of Everything, is certainly the buzzword of the year. Does IoT describe one product family? Not really as the acronym describes a family of concepts, each of these concepts could effectively be turned into a family of products, if this concept reach the market, or fulfill a market need. Nevertheless… Read More
A Brief History of ASTC and VLAB Works
When I worked for VaST our engineering was in Sydney Australia. To my surprise there was another, entirely independent, group working on virtual platform modeling and tools in another place in Australia, in Adelaide. Is there something in the Fosters? They had originally been part of Motorola Corporate R&D and Software Group,… Read More
ANSYS Electronics Simulation Expo – A View from Industry
As we are seeing more and more automation in most of our activities, not only through software but also smart electronics (at cutting-edge technologies) equipped with processors, micro-controllers, sensors and so on which make a whole system as an integrated entity on a small piece of semiconductor intertwined with other systems… Read More
eSilicon Creates One-Click Access to MPW and GDSII Quoting Portals
I have written before about eSilicon taking their internal quoting tool and making it user accessible. This first started just for MPW shuttles for half-a-dozen foundries, and then was extended to cover production runs at TSMC. And it is getting heavily used; eSilicon have had 315 people register to use it from 43 different countries… Read More
Virtual Platform Powers AUTOSAR Software Development
As a significant part of our life is spent in travelling, it’s natural that automotive sector continues to get traction with a significant push towards electronics and automated solutions for automobiles such as cars to provide safety, comfort and entertainment. These solutions are provided by complete systems which operate… Read More
Two New Announcements at ITC from Synopsys
Each year at the International Test Conference(ITC) we hear about the latest advances from the testability side of both EDA vendors and academics. This year Aart de Geus, Chairman and Co-CEO of Synopsys delivered a keynote speech titled, “Testing Positive, for Complexity“. Yesterday I spoke with Robert Ruiz and… Read More
SecureCore: secure MPU for IoT
The evaluation of the number of connected (IoT) systems by 2020 varies depending on the source, but we should see in the range of 30 billion IoT devices by that date. We already know some of the basic requirements: such a device will have to be connected, low cost, ultra-low power and… secure. The first three are key enablers, but we … Read More
Real men have fabs!