Engineers love acronyms and my latest blog post has three acronyms in the title alone, so hopefully you are doing or considering SoC designs with the AMBA AXI4(Advanced eXtensible Interface 4) interface specification along with PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express). One big motivation for using semiconductor… Read More





25 Years of SNUG; 50 Years of Moore’s Law
Earlier this week it was the Synopsys user group meeting SNUG. Not just any old SNUG but the 25th Annual SNUG. The first one was 15th March 1991 and was attended by 100 people. At the time, Synopsys had annual revenues of $22M. This year, the various SNUGs around the world will have a total attendance of 10,000 people and Synopsys revenue… Read More
Innovative MIPI Display Solution for UHD Mobile Devices
Today an SoC cannot be without multiple IP blocks integrated together in the most optimal manner. In such an environment, it’s natural that interoperability and configurability of an IP get prime considerations to achieve the best PPA (Power, Performance and Area) for the SoC containing that IP. While PPA is a basic criterion … Read More
Chips and pins and layers within
After teams sweat the details of SoC and industrial design, they turn to printed circuit board designers for magic. Here are a pile of chips and passives, and a schematic for interconnecting them. This is how much physical space the board can occupy. Connectors have to be here, and here, and mounting holes there, and there. There … Read More
The Apple A9 Samsung & TSMC Love Triangle
The Apple A9 drama continues to play out with no certainty!
At the end of the day does it matter?
Will the winner be the loser?
A Comedy, Tragedy or Love Story?
Depends on your view…
Act I Scene I…The stage is set….
We are watching an Italian Opera of a standard love triangle….
The object of desire is the rich … Read More
TSMC 2015 Technology Symposium
This year’s North American TSMC Technology Symposium is fast approaching. There are three, starting in Silicon Valley.
- San Jose on Tuesday April 7th at the San Jose Convention Center
- Boston on Tuesday April 14th at the Burlington Marriott
- Austin on Thursday April 16th at the downtown Hilton
The symposium will also take … Read More
Apple’s ARMed History
Apple has redefined three industries within a decade: media player with the iPod, mobile handset with the iPhone and portable computers with the iPad. If there is anything common in these three game-changing product development stories other than Apple, it’s the ARM footprint. Even now the technology media is abuzz with speculation… Read More
This Market worth $1,465.62M by 2020!!
This is exactly what you will never see in IPnest surveys (and written in Semiwiki):“Advanced Process Control Market worth $1,465.62 Million by 2020” …sorry for you if you like very precise figure (like $ 1, 465.62 million) but you will NEVER see such insane forecast in any of our surveys or blogs. Building a forecast is a difficult… Read More
A Brief History of Kilopass
Kilopass was founded back in 2001 by Jack Peng, whose background was in FPGAs with his most recent position being manager of technology development at Actel (now part of Microsemi). The idea was to build a company making one-time-programmable (OTP) memories using anti-fuse technology. Fuses in home-wiring (OK, I know, we all … Read More
Semiconductors off to slow start in 2015
A weak first quarter outlook for the semiconductor market is indicating a slow start to 2015. Intel recently lowered the midpoint of its 1Q 2015 revenue guidance from $13.7 billion (down 7% from 4Q 2014) to $12.8 billion (down 13%). The table below shows the estimated top 25 semiconductor companies revenue change for 4Q 2014 versus… Read More
cHBM for AI: Capabilities, Challenges, and Opportunities