On Sunday night at DAC this week I sat in the front row and listened to Gary Smith give his predictions about EDA and IP as an industry. His financial forecast was a $6.8B industry in 2015, growing to $9B in 2019. An ideal company for Wall Street to invest in would have slow and steady growth. If you add semiconductor IP into the forecast… Read More
Jitter: The Overlooked PDN Quality MetricBruce Caryl is a Product Specialist with Siemens EDA…Read More
CEO Interview with Vamshi Kothur, of Tuple TechnologiesIt was my pleasure to meet with Vamshi…Read More
Webinar – Power is the New Performance: Scaling Power & Performance for Next Generation SoCsWhat if you could reduce power and extend…Read More
Reachability in Analog and AMS. Innovation in VerificationCan a combination of learning-based surrogate models plus…Read More
Google Smart Lens: IC Design and Beyond
Today’s DAC keynote was by Brian Otis of Google about their project, working with Novartis, to build disposable contact lenses that perform continuous glucose monitoring.
Why is this important? There are 382M people around the world with diabetes who typically have to check their blood glucose levels four times a day. … Read More
EDA Acquisition to Drive SoC realization
A week ago I was reading an article written by Daniel Nenni where he emphasised about semiconductor acquisitions to fuel innovation. We would see that in a larger space, not only in semiconductor and FPGA manufacturing companies (e.g. Intel and Altera) but also in the whole semiconductor ecosystem. If we see it from technical perspective,… Read More
TSMC Shows 10nm Wafer!
If you really want to know why I write about TSMC it is all about ego, my massive ego, absolutely. Blogs about TSMC and the foundries have always driven the most traffic and they most likely always will. Semiconductor IP is second, Semiconductor Design is third, and I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon:
SemiWiki BI: Daniel… Read More
Next Generation Formal Technology to Boost Verification
With growing complexities and sizes of SoCs, verification has become a key challenge for design closure. There isn’t a single methodology that can provide complete verification closure for an SoC. Moreover creation of verification environment including hardware, software, testbench and testcases requires significant … Read More
Synopsys to Acquire Atrenta
I was at the DAC kickoff this evening in the Intercontinental Hotel. I was talking to Dave DeMaria, the senior marketing guy at Synopsys and he told me of a couple of minor press releases due to hit the wire tomorrow morning, didn’t sound important enough to be blogworthy. Aart was there too although I didn’t speak to him.… Read More
5 Things Chipmakers Are Missing on the IoT
When the RISC movement surfaced in 1982, researchers analyzed UNIX to discover what instructions multi-user code was actually using, and then designed an instruction set and execution pipeline to do that better. Fewer instructions meant fewer transistors, which led to less power consumption – although in the original… Read More
Turning the Automotive Development Process Upside Down
Most of us drive automobiles and have a vague idea that the development of our cars takes many years, millions of dollars, is a proprietary process and require huge factories to produce. A relatively new company called Local Motors founded in 2007 has started to turn the automotive development process upside down because they do… Read More
ESD Protection Network Checking is Difficult But Necessary
I’ve written before about anti-fuse non-volatile memory, where the gate oxide is intentionally damaged in order to create a readable bit of data, but this is what most circuit designers never want to have happen to their logic gates. However, since the advent of MOS transistors the issue of Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) and the… Read More
Vacationing with the Fabless Semiconductor Ecosystem!
The Design Automation Conference is the largest and most diverse event in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. Next week in San Francisco you will see technology and people you have never seen before. You will benefit from the efforts of hundreds of thousands of semiconductor professionals like myself who have dedicated their… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography