Various foundries have made announcements about licensing FD-SOI technology from ST Microelectronics and then fallen quiet. GlobalFoundries made an announcement a couple of years ago. Samsung made an announcement just before DAC last year. But neither company has said anything much since. Of course the big noise at 14/16nm… Read More
New Cooling Strategies for Future ComputingPower densities on chips increased from 50-100 W/cm2…Read More
DAC News – proteanTecs Unlocks AI Hardware Growth with Runtime MonitoringAs AI models grow exponentially, the infrastructure supporting…Read More
Sophisticated soundscapes usher in cache-coherent multicore DSPDigital audio processing is evolving into an art…Read More
A Quick Look at Agentic/Generative AI in Software EngineeringAgentic methods are hot right now since single…Read More
Has the Semiconductor Industry Gone Mad?
The weather in Taiwan last week was very strange. It was so cold I tried to turn on the heat in my hotel room only to find out it was not possible. If you want more heat they bring a portable heater because who needs central heat in Hsinchu? Even stranger is all of the media hyperbole on the next process nodes:
Intel CFO: We’re so far… Read More
Product Review: Bose – SoundTrue Around-Ear Headphones
My old headphones with microphone lost a channel, so it was time to upgrade and I went shopping for something that had high fidelity and fit over my ears, instead of on my ears. After some online research I opted for the Bose headphones, because that brand has been around for decades, they offer many models to choose from, and are readily… Read More
Why Would You Leave Yahoo to Go Into EDA?
I sat down this afternoon with Peter Theunis, the CTO of Methodics. Conveniently their office is about a 15 minute walk from where I live so we could chat face to face.
Peter started programming when he was 8 and his first “product” was a weather system for orchards where sensors in the orchards would send information … Read More
Cadence 2014 Results
Cadence announced their Q4 and 2014 results yesterday. They are the only one of the big 3 EDA companies whose fiscal year is the calendar year so Synopsys and Mentor will not be joining them in announcing them this week.
I won’t go into the numbers in detail, you can find them all easily enough. But it is a pity that statements like… Read More
Google Glass: The Second Coming and a Brief History
Google Glass is dead; long live Google Glass. That’s how Ori Inbar stated the recent closure of Google Glass beta-test project in his report titled “Smart Glasses Market 2015: Towards 1 Billion Shipments” released by www.augmentedreality.org.
Inbar says that Google, a smart glass pioneer, not only compromised its status in … Read More
Concept: From Schematics to Debug
In the late 1990s I was the VP Engineering at Ambit Design Systems. We had a synthesis product (called BuildGates, nobody ever forgot the name). Both our own engineers and our customers wanted to be able to take a look at the gate-level netlist that was generated from their RTL. We used a product from a company called Concept Engineering… Read More
What’s Hot at SPIE Advanced Lithography
The 40[SUP]th[/SUP] SPIE Advanced Lithography conference will be at the San Jose Convention Center 22-26 February. Over the past few years, this conference has grown in scope to include emerging patterning technologies, like directed self-assembly (DSA) and design-process-technology co-optimization.
Underlying all … Read More
Temperature Monitoring IP to Revamp SoCs
With increasing density and functionality of chips at extremely thin silicon and metal layers, temperature has become critical. The temperature situation can become worse with wireless enabled 24/7 power-on devices. In such a scenario, a device must manage its thermal profile dynamically to keep the temperature within tolerable… Read More
New Suite of ARM IP for Mobile
ARM had a big press/analyst show at the Epic Roasthouse here in San Francisco this morning. They announced a new portfolio of IP targeted at the next generation mobile experience. There were 4 components to the announcement:
- A new microprocessor, the Cortex-A72. More details below
- New CoreLink CCI-500 Cache Coherent Interconnect
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing