Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. I fear the Greeks especially when bearing gifts. In Virgil’s Aeneid these words are spoken by the Trojan priest Laocoön warning about the wooden horse that the Greeks have offered Troy. But to no avail, Laocoön is slain by serpents and the Trojans bring the horse inside the walls of Troy. Since… Read More
WEBINAR: Edge AI Optimization: How to Design Future-Proof Architectures for Next-Gen Intelligent DevicesEdge AI is rapidly transforming how intelligent solutions…Read More
WEBINAR Unpacking System Performance: Supercharge Your Systems with Lossless Compression IPsIn today's data-driven systems—from cloud storage and AI…Read More
ChipAgents Tackles Debug. This is ImportantInnovation is never ending in verification, for performance,…Read More
Siemens EDA Unveils Groundbreaking Tools to Simplify 3D IC Design and AnalysisIn a major announcement at the 2025 Design…Read More
CEO Interview with Faraj Aalaei of CognichipFaraj Aalaei is a successful visionary entrepreneur with…Read More
Will those IO pad rings pass foundry muster?
I was talking recently to Dina Medhat, a senior technical marketing engineer at Mentor, about, of all things, IO rings. It has not occurred to me that verifying that your IO rings comply with foundry rules presents new challenges.
IO ring checking isn’t new, nor is it unique to advanced IC process nodes. However, the same forces of… Read More
NVIDIA and Qualcomm Talk about High Level Synthesis, Samsung on Low Power for Mobile
Since 1978 I’ve seen many trends in the semiconductor design world: transistor-level IC design, gate-level design, RTL coding, High Level Synthesis (HLS) and IP re-use. We’ve witnessed the growth in design productivity enabling chips starting with just thousands of transistor all the way up to billions of transistors… Read More
Atmel Tightens Automotive Focus with Three New Cortex-M7 MCUs
Atmel Corp., a lead partner for the ARM Cortex-M7 processor launch in October 2014, has unveiled three new M7-based microcontrollers with a unique memory architecture and advanced connectivity features for the connected car market.
According to the company spokesman, E70, V71 and V70 chips are the industry’s highest performing… Read More
Changing Trends at the Top of Semicon Space
As we have moved down from a CAGR of ~9% over last three decades to a CAGR of ~5% in the current decade, it’s time to check the realities. It can be definitely argued that a 5% of CAGR over a solid base of ~$378 billion should be considered good enough. In my view that’s the sign of maturity in the semiconductor market. At the same time we are… Read More
Semiconductor Acquisitions will Fuel Innovation!
Has the semiconductor world gone acquisition crazy? It certainly seems that way with the more than $60B in M&A activity which may now include Altera. We are probably getting close to the 80/20 rule where 80% of the semiconductor revenue is being generated by 20% of the companies. Not far off from where we were at 25 years ago when… Read More
Synopsys Software Integrity: Find All the Bugs
A couple of days ago Synopsys announced that they were acquiring Quotium’s product Seeker. This is an interactive application security testing (IAST) product. Synopsys are acquiring the product and the R&D team, not the whole of Quotium. The Seeker solution is a pioneering solution for IAST that helps businesses find high-risk… Read More
"Cook’s Law" supersedes "Moore’s Law"-its impact on Apple, Samsung, TSMC & Intel
Apple drives the semi industry harder than Wintel ever did: Is winning Apple’s chip business a pyrrhic victory? Is 14nm done before it starts? Too short to be profitable?
Chips marching to an Apple cadence…
In the “old days” when Wintel ruled the roost and drove the semi industry, it was driving spending… Read More
Virtual HIL and the 100M LOC car
Aerospace and defense applications have traditionally leveraged hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing to overcome several issues. A big one is how expensive the physical system is. Even breaking down the system into subsystems for test can still be too expensive when fielding more than a couple test stations. Modeling elements… Read More
SITRI and Coventor Partner to Scale Up MEMS in China
When it comes to wearable technology and the rapidly emerging world of IoT, sensors and MEMS are on the frontlines. They collect and transfer raw data such as pressure, temperature and motion and process it with algorithms critical to making sure the right information gets to humans and/or machines so the right reaction is enabled.… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography