Who’s going to DesignCon next week? I am, absolutely. Dr. Hermann Eul, Vice President & General Manager, Mobile & Communications Group, Intel Corporation will be keynoting on Tuesday. This one I want to hear! Intel missed mobile at 32nm, 22nm, and 14nm. Lets see what they have planned for 10nm. Something good I hope!… Read More


The Semiconductor Landscape – III
In continuation to my earlier observations and anticipations (landscape1, landscape2) which came up to my expectations, I was further inspired to ponder over the macros of our ever growing semiconductor industry. We may argue the business is stagnating, we may argue that the pace of scaling is slowing, but when I look back at the… Read More
SilabTech Awarded 2013 Best Start-up in India
This is obviously great news for SilabTech, and this is the type of news which will change the perception that we (non-Indian) have of the Semiconductor industry in India. About 15-20 years ago, the India Embedded/VLSI industry was perceived as low cost design resource pool, a good place where to implement design center. The hidden… Read More
Intel is NOT Transparent Again!
Recent headlines suggest that Intel was not transparent about some of the products they showed at the CES keynote. Intel confirmed on Friday that they used ARM-based chips for some of the products but would not say which ones. When your company’s tag line is “Intel Inside” and you hold up a product during your keynote wouldn’t… Read More
Managing Heat for System Reliability
In most of the electronic equipments, semiconductor chips are a major source of heat generation. And in semiconductor designs several hardware and software techniques are being used to contain power dissipation; a major cause for heat. However due to multiple functionality being squeezed into small form factors, we continue… Read More
JasperGold COV App, the Swiss Army Knife for Verification
At the Jasper Users Group meeting in October Rajeev Ranjan presented on the JasperGold COV App which he described as the Swiss army knife for verification. It comes in many sizes and contains many useful tools.
The primary goal of COV is to provide coverage metrics:
- stimuli coverage: how restrictive is the design behavior under
Handel Jones Predicts Process Roadmap Slips
At the SEMI ISS conference earlier this week, the last speaker in the technology challenges section was Handel Jones of IBS. I’ve known Handel since the mid-1980s when he came to VLSI Technology and told us we were losing money on 90% of the designs we were doing but our cost model was not good enough and so we didn’t even… Read More
Positive Semiconductor Job Outlook in 2014!
Based on local traffic patterns and my experience in Silicon Valley over the last 30 years we are looking at a much higher employment rate inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem, absolutely. Jobs are being filled more so than I have seen in the past ten years. The challenge of course is finding the right people for the right job… Read More
International CES Wrapup
Semiconductor Intelligence attended the International CES last week in Las Vegas, Nevada. A wide variety of consumer electronics devices were displayed at the conference. These ranged from:
· Fascinating – but is it practical? (personal robots, drones)
· Exciting – but when will it be cheap enough for the mass market? (UHD TV,… Read More
MIPI Alliance Specifications Adoption Status in 2013
At the beginning of December in Paris I had the opportunity to make a presentation to a very impressive audience, technical gurus from companies contributing to MIPI Alliance specification were here, including ST-Microelectronics, Intel, Qualcomm, TI, Toshiba, Nokia, Samsung, to name a few. … Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki