Samsung, #1 in the mobile phones based on unit shipments, has two big problems in mobile. Apple’s iPhone; and China in general and Huawei in particular in the Android world where they live. They have just announced their fifth quarter of decline. Revenue was down 8% year on year but operating profit declined 38%. They sold … Read More



Why Modern SoC need cache-coherent NoC?
Launching high technology product on the semiconductor market after your competitors is not necessarily a weakness. NetSpeed has developed NocStudio, a front end optimization design tool helping architects to create SoC architecture bridging the gap with the back end, floor planning and place and route. Created about 20 years… Read More
More FPGA-based prototype myths quashed
Speaking of having the right tools, FPGA-based prototyping has become as much if not more about the synthesis software than it is about the FPGA hardware. This is a follow-up to my post earlier this month on FPGA-based prototyping, but with a different perspective from another vendor. Instead of thinking about what else can be done… Read More
John Koeter: How To Be #1 in Interface IP
John Koeter is in charge of marketing Synopsys’ IP and prototyping solutions. I talked to him last week.
He grew up in upstate New York, son of a Scottish mother and a Dutch father who immigrated to the US, so he is first generation American, unlike everyone else I’ve interviewed so far for this series who were born overseas.… Read More
Good Morning Vietnam
This morning I went to a presentation in Palo Alto about outsourcing in Vietnam. You have probably heard that Vietnam is the new China for manufacturing, as wages have increased in the Shenzhen area then companies like Foxconn have opened plants in Vietnam. But this meeting was mostly about services, software and design. In this… Read More
Semiconductor Mergers – Innovation or Consolidation?
About 3 years ago, I had written an article about consolidation in the semiconductor landscape where I had articulated 4 main reasons of consolidation – Macroeconomics, Business Leadership, Technology Leadership, and IP leadership. Back then, based on the state of affairs in the semiconductor industry, I had also mentioned… Read More
Talking Directly to EDA R&D
Many EDA companies keep their R&D engineers focused on product development and bug fixing, shielding them from any and all direct contact with end-users, mostly for fear of what might be revealed if such direct dialog were allowed. Customer support people are allowed to talk directly with customers, then pass along enhancement… Read More
Addressing Moore’s Law with the First Law of Real Estate: Location, location, location
Design sizes and complexities have grown exponentially (it’s a Law!), and consequentially the task of silicon test has become proportionally more expensive. The cost of testing a device is proportional to the amount of test data that is applied, and therefore the time it takes, which in turn is proportional to both design size … Read More
SSD Storage Chips: Basic Interconnect Considerations
The joint development of 3D XPoint memory technology from Intel and Micron has once more brought the spotlight on data centers and chips for solid-state drives (SSDs). The two semiconductor industry giants claim that 3D XPoint memory is1,000 times faster than NAND Flash: the underlying memory content for SSDs. Such developments… Read More
I want to use USB Type C (and I want it now)
USB is certainly the most ubiquitous of the Interface protocols, used in our day to day life to connect multiple systems, as well as in professional segments like industrial or even high performance servers (yes, these systems integrates USB 3 connections). But USB is also one of the protocols able to generate frustration every… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot