Rarely do I fly first class but I did on my recent trip to Asia. It was one of the new planes with pod-like seats that transforms into a bed. The flight left SFO at 1 A.M. so I fell asleep almost immediately missing the first gourmet meal. About half way through the flight I found myself barely awake staring straight up and what do I see? STARS!… Read More
Analog Bits Demos Real-Time On-Chip Power Sensing and Delivery on N2P at the TSMC 2026 Technology SymposiumAnalog Bits has a way of stealing the…Read More
Disaggregating LLM Inference: Inside the SambaNova Intel Heterogeneous Compute BlueprintSambaNova Systems and Intel have introduced a blueprint…Read More
CEO Interview with Johan Wadenholt Vrethem of VoxoWith over two decades of experience bridging technology…Read More
TSMC to Elon Musk: There are no Shortcuts in Building Fabs!The opening of the TSMC 2026 earning call…Read More
Speculation: Silicon’s Most Expensive CompulsionHow Time-Based Scheduling Reclaims Silicon Wasted by Speculative…Read More
Adding NAND Flash Can Be Tricky
As consumers, we take NAND flash memory for granted. It has worked its way into a vast array of products. These include USB drives, SD cards, wearables, IoT devices, tablets, phones and increasingly SSD’s for computer systems. From the outside the magic of flash memory seems quite simple, but we have to remember that this is a technology… Read More
TSMC is the Top Dog in Pure-Play Foundry Business
We all have echoed the fact that the arrival of fabless business model in the semiconductor industry has transformed it completely. The book, “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” provides several stories around that. In the backdrop of that, one key point to ponder upon is the start of pure-play foundries;… Read More
Solido Wrote the Book on Variation
When I studied mathematical analysis, one of the things that we had to prove turns out to be surprisingly difficult. If you have a continuous function and at one point it is below a line (say zero) and at another point it is above zero, then there must be a point at which the value is exactly zero. In effect, a continuous function can’t… Read More
Xtensa core in Qualcomm low-power Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi has this reputation as being a power hog. It takes a relatively big processor to run at full throughput. It is always transmitting all over the place, and it isn’t very efficient at doing it. Most of those preconceived notions arose from older chips targeting the primary use case for Wi-Fi in enterprise and residential environments.… Read More
Optimizing SRAM IP for Yield and Reliability
My IC design career started out with DRAM at Intel, and included SRAM embedded in GPUs, so I recall some common questions that face memory IP designers even today, like:
- Does reading a bit flip the stored data?
- Can I write both 0 and 1 into every cell?
- Will read access times be met?
- While lowering the supply voltage does the cell data retain?
Michael Sanie Plays the Synopsys Verification Variations
I met Michael Sanie last week. He is in charge of verification marketing at Synopsys. I know him well since he worked for me at both VLSI Technology and Cadence. In fact his first job out of college was to take over support of VLSIextract (our circuit extractor), which I had written. But we are getting ahead.
Michael was born in Iran and… Read More
China: drag on global semiconductor market?
The Chinese stock market (as measured by the Hang Seng Index) dropped 11% from August 14 to August 24 over concerns of a slowing economy. In reaction, the U.S. stock market (as measured by the S&P 500) dropped 11% from August 17 to August 25. The China market has since rebounded 2% while the U.S. market rebounded 5%. Will a slowing… Read More
Simulating to a fault in automotive and more
We’re putting the finishing touches on Chapter 9 of our upcoming book on ARM processors in mobile, this chapter looking at the evolution of Qualcomm. One of the things that made Qualcomm go was their innovative use of digital simulation. First, simulation proved out the Viterbi decoder (which Viterbi wasn’t convinced had a lot … Read More
4 Design Tips for AVB in Car Infotainment
Audio Video Bridging (AVB) is a well-established standard for in-car infotainment, and there is a significant amount of activity for specifying and developing AVB solutions in vehicles. The primary use case for AVB is interconnecting all devices in a vehicle’s infotainment system. That includes the head unit, rear-seat entertainment… Read More
Is Intel About to Take Flight?