Up until last December I was president and owner of IC Knowledge LLC, at the end of November, I sold IC Knowledge LLC to TechInsights. It has been interesting to become an insider at the world’s leading semiconductor reverse engineering and knowledge company. The latest SMIC N+2 analysis is an excellent example of TechInsight’s… Read More
Podcast EP180: A New Silicon Catalyst Incubator Program in the UK with Sean Redmond
Dan is joined by Sean Redmond, managing partner for Silicon Catalyst. Sean has nearly 40 years of experience in the semiconductor and software industries including stints at VLSI technology, Verisity Design, Cadence, ARC, and others. Sean has recently worked closely with the UK government on industrial digital strategy, co-chairing… Read More
ViShare’s Rapid Market Entry with FPGA-Based Prototyping Solution from S2C
ViShare Technology, a fabless semiconductor company focusing on video codec, developed a chip for 8K60 video streaming with the help of S2C FPGA-based prototyping solution. This solution enables ViShare to accelerate its verification process and time-to-market by 6 months.
Since its establishment in 2012, ViShare has been… Read More
Mixed Signal Verification is Growing in Importance
I have historically avoided mixed signal topics, assuming they decouple from digital and can be left to the experts. That simple view no longer holds water. Analog and digital are becoming more closely linked through control loops and datapaths, requiring a careful balancing act in verification between performance, accuracy… Read More
Advancing Semiconductor Processes with Novel Extreme UV Photoresist Materials
Introduction
The ever-growing demand for faster, smaller, and more efficient electronic devices has fueled the semiconductor industry’s relentless pursuit of innovation. One crucial technology at the heart of semiconductor manufacturing is Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUVL) to achieve smaller feature sizes… Read More
Rad Hard Circuit Design and Optimization for Space Applications
The Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology (MCTIC) has a research unit, Renato Archer Information Technology Center (CTI), and two of their IC engineers presented at the MunEDA User Group meeting this May on the topic of designing Latching Current Limiter (LCL) circuits for space applications with RHBD (radiation-hardened… Read More
Extending RISC-V for accelerating FIR and median filters
RISC-V presents a unique opportunity for designers to extend the microarchitecture with custom instructions. One possible application is digital signal filtering using finite impulse response (FIR) or median filters, potential algorithms for carrier demodulation schemes in communications systems like 5G. Codasip application… Read More
Fitting GPT into Edge Devices, Why and How
It is tempting to think that everything GPT-related is just chasing the publicity bandwagon and that articles on the topic, especially with evidently impossible claims (as in this case), are simply clickbait. In fact, there are practical reasons for hosting at least a subset of these large language models (LLMs) on edge devices… Read More
Interface IP in 2022: 22% YoY growth still data-centric driven
We have shown in the “Design IP Report” 2022 that the market share of the wired Interface IP category is a growing part of the total IP, and that this trend is confirmed year after year. The interface IP category has moved from 18% share in 2017 to 25% in 2022.
During the 2010-decade, smartphone was the strong driver for the IP industry,… Read More
Former TSMC President Don Brooks
Don Brooks is well known to many long time semiconductor insiders, like myself, but most SemiWiki readers have probably never heard of him. Don is a semiconductor legend and here is his story. This will be in two parts since he had a big impact on the semiconductor industry and TSMC. From 1991 to 1997 Don served as President of TSMC and… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay