Paul McClellan and I are at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium this week in Half Moon Bay. Honestly there is too much to blog about here so I will have to pick the topics most interesting to me. The full capacity audience is also impressive. SEMI provides a list of attendees on their website which reads like “Who’s Who” of the semiconductor… Read More




2015 International CES: wearables and smart home
2015 International CES was held last week in Las Vegas. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) which puts on the show said over 170,000 people attended. The show featured more than 3,600 exhibitors covering over 2.2 million square feet of exhibit space.
In advance of the show, CEA released highlights of its forecast for the… Read More
HiFi Sounds Better than Ever
If you think that the sound atmosphere created by Dolby or Surround–sound audio is the best you can achieve today by using complexes algorithms on DSP, like I thought before knowing about “Object-Based Audio”, you must read these lines! In fact Surround-sound Audio is limited by the number of speakers installed in a room, or a car,… Read More
A Group of Happy Employees that Excels in Everything They Do!
I visited AtrentaNoida in August 2013 during the inauguration of its newly expanded facility. At that time, I had written about the beautiful environment Atrenta has, with its presence at many sites across the world in my blog – “Innovation + Thoughtful Management = Productive Expansion”. Innovation cannot happen without happy… Read More
Twelve Years of Sonics at Toshiba
Sonics announced today that Toshiba has completed the SoC design using Sonics’ on-chip network IP for its new TZ2100 group of application processors. The TZ2100 group of applications processors are the newest addition to Toshiba’s ApP Lite (Application Processor Lite) TZ2000 series. With this group of ApP Lite devices, sound… Read More
Semiconductor Design: Chips to Systems!
This is the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] year of DesignCon and I’m really looking forward to it. While I haven’t attended all 20 I certainly have attended the majority of them. Now it is like a college reunion for me seeing all sorts of friends and former coworkers. One of them is even a keynote but more on that later. This year there are 14 conference… Read More
Je Suis Charlie
Last Monday was the first working day of 2015, dedicated to installing a new PC. Tuesday was also dedicated to an admin work, asking for a new passport, so Wednesday was supposed to be the first real working day for me. In fact, because the Radio is on when I am working, I heard about this crazy offense against the complete editorial board… Read More
Intel’s Diversity Goals Explained!
One of the more interesting announcements by Intel at CES was surprisingly not about technology, it was about a $300M Investing in Diversity and Inclusion initiative. According to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich “A fully diverse and inclusive workplace is fundamental to our ability to innovate and deliver business results.” After … Read More
Wanna Buy a Used Stepper? Only One Owner, Mint Condition…
Back in the early 90s there used to be a billboard alongside 237 advertising second-hand fab equipment: steppers, ion implanters, diffusion ovens. It used to amuse me as an “only in silicon valley” thing; after all, even in silicon valley the number of individuals who were likely to be in a position to buy used fab equipment… Read More
Curie to Bring New Dimensions in Wearables!
In the past year, seeing the kinds of wearables doing what Smartphones can do, I wasn’t much excited about wearables; however after looking at what Intelhas demonstrated in CES 2015, a button sized SoC called Curie, I get to believe that it will be a game changer in wearables and would let Intel do what it couldn’t do with Smartphone… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside