About a decade ago, semiconductor designs had just a few asynchronous clocks which were easily managed by designers through the process of manual design reviews. The situation today is completely different. An SoC can have hundreds of asynchronous clocks, driving different complex functions, spread across various IPs, supplied… Read More


Embedded Vision Summit: the How-to and the How-to
When I realized I had the opportunity to attend the Embedded Vision Summit (EVS) if I would change a return flight to a day earlier, I didn’t hesitate. Thankfully I was able to change my flight without any nuisance fee from the airline, and attended EVS.
There were two “How-to’s” at this Summit:
- The algorithmic
What is Authentication and Why Should You Care?
Authentication means making sure that something is real, just like it sounds.In the real world, authentication has many uses. One of the most recognizable is anti-counterfeiting, which means validating the authenticity of a removable, replaceable, or consumable client. Examples include system accessories, electronic … Read More
TSMC (TSM) is Having Another SoC Year!
TSMC’s stock has more than doubled in the last five years. Coincidentally that is when I started blogging about TSMC. QCOM stock has experienced a similar doubling during this time as have other TSMC customers. The question is: What is next for TSMC? As I have mentioned before, you would be better off taking stock tips from your dog… Read More
Aldec Can Ensure Smooth System Integration
Tools, tools, tools. Designs are rapidly changing, JESD204b, Hybrid Memory cube and all other Gigabit serialization schemes are here to stay. RIP DDR. This means board level simulations with respect to firmware (FPGA) are going to be more challenging than ever. Why? you ask, especially if the board layout is simpler? True, but… Read More
Five Things You Don’t Know About MunEDA
So first the one thing that you do know. MunEDA are based in Munich which makes them German. I have to confess that until I got involved helping them a bit with some marketing stuff that that was about all I knew about them too.
So now five things that you might not know:
1. MunEDA have a much wider customer list that you know and would even… Read More
Xilinx KCU105 Evaluation board is key for your demo
I love God, my wife, kids, and FPGA boards. I know I am not alone, there are other nerds out there, don’t be shy. Friday my “Kintex® UltraScale™ FPGA KCU105 Evaluation Kit” came in. Think about this, this is real 20nm Xilinx FPGA hardware that really works. Below is a nice picture of all the swizzles the board has.
I believe this is the … Read More
National Semiconductor Education in the Cloud
“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” wrote Wordsworth. Well, clouds are pretty lonely in EDA these days. Despite some of the advantages on paper that mean that companies from salesforce.com to Netflix make heavy use of cloud-computing, semiconductor design has barely touched the cloud. One exception was Nimbic (acquired… Read More
Product Marketing & the Butterfly Effect
I often feel that product marketing can simultaneously be an underrated and overrated function. More often than not, it suggests product goals, pricing, and positioning. Then the marketing department must defend those positions to both engineering and sales. However, both the engineering and sales departments can claim expertise… Read More
FinFET Based Designs Made Easy & Reliable
Although semiconductor manufacturing has taken off with FinFET based process technology which provides lucrative payoffs on performance improvement, power reduction and area saving in devices for high density and high performance SoC demand of modern era, apprehensions remain about its reliability due to reduced noise … Read More
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