It now appears that Steve Ballmer was suddenly given his walking papers at the urging of an activist investor (ValueAct) and with the concurrence of Bill Gates. Wall Street’s growing impatience tends to coincide when the Innovators Dilemma scenario has taken hold of a company that has been unable to overcome its challengers. Why… Read More
Ballmer’s Retirement Leaves Nokia High and Dry
It looks to me as if Ballmer’s planned resignation from Microsoft is going to leave Nokia high and dry without an operating system. Because any successor to Ballmer will cancel Windows Phone which has managed to take Microsoft’s penetration in smartphones from 5% before it had a serious partnership with Nokia all … Read More
LSI’s Experience With Formality Ultra
LSI is an early adopter of Formality Ultra, Synopsys’s tool for improving the entire ECO flow. I already wrote about the basic capability of the tool here. ECOs are changes that come very late in the design cycle, after place and route has already been “nearly” completed. They occur either due to last minute spec… Read More
Something old, something new in SystemC HLS
Perhaps no area in EDA has been as enigmatic as high-level synthesis (HLS). At nearly every industry event, some new-fangled tool always seems to be tabbed as the next big thing by some analyst or pundit. In a twist, the latest news is on one of the oldest tools – CybeWorkBench.… Read More
Ten Ways Your Synchronizer MTBF May Be Wrong
Estimating the MTBF of an SoC should always include an analysis of synchronizer reliability. Contemporary process nodes are introducing new challenges to the reliability of clock domain crossings so it is prudent to revisit how your simulation tool calculates a synchronizer’s MTBF. Let’s list the ten most common pitfalls.… Read More
Security Needs in On-Chip Networks
I remember during my first ten years as a software developer, I used many different computers such as IBM mainframes, Apollo and Sun workstations, and VAX computers. During that time I also bought my first home computer, a Macintosh. I didn’t of course think of this at the time, but the one thing they all had in common was that they did… Read More
The TSMC OIP Technical Paper Abstracts are up!
The TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) Ecosystem Forum brings TSMC’s design ecosystem member companies together to share with our customers real-case solutions for customers’ design challenges and success stories of best practice in TSMC’s design ecosystem.
More than 90% of the attendees last year said “this… Read More
Intel Really is Delaying 14nm Move-in. 450mm is Slipping Too. EUV, who knows?
I attended the semi-annual SEMI Silicon Valley Lunch meeting last week. The semiconductor equipment people are the ones that really know what is going on. People can talk about capex numbers on conference calls but it is the equipment vendors who either do or do not get orders for particular types of equipment. In turn, the analysts… Read More
Low-Power Design Analysis and Optimization for Mobile and High-Performance Computing Applications
For several decades now consumers like me have enjoyed using mobile devices including:
- Transistor radios, my first one had just 6 discreet transistors in the 1960’s
- HP 21 Calculator, used in college with Reverse Polish Notation, circa 1976
- Zenith Data Systems laptop, with two floppy drives, 1980’s
- Palm Pilot V,
Microsoft Signals the Return of "Expensive Hardware, Cheap Software"
The announcement that Steve Ballmer will step down from Microsoft within the next 12 months and just weeks after kicking off a vast re-org focused on mobile devices can only mean that the future is coming much faster than Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer had ever expected and that without a radical adoption of hardware everywhere, it will… Read More
Will my High-Speed Serial Link Work?