The number of IPs with growing complexity and heterogeneity is ever increasing (counting into hundreds) to be integrated into a single SoC. It’s not possible to have them all available at once and in a single repository for the integration engineers to assemble all of them together and integrate into the SoC. The reality is that … Read More



Do You Really Know RapidIO?
About 10 years ago, I was in charge of the product definition of our next IP to be released, the PCI Express gen-1 Controller. I was also involved in the decision process to select the new functions to develop, in respect with the market size, all of this being the definition of “marketing”. The reason why our company decided not to develop… Read More
TSMC Updates: 20nm, 16nm, and 10nm!
*Spoiler Alert: The Sky is Not Falling*
The TSMC Technology Symposium last month provided a much needed technology refresh to counter aging industry experts (they make their living selling reports) who have been somewhat negative on the future of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. If the sky wasn’t falling who would… Read More
LSI’s Way of Faster & Reliable Electronic System Design
LSI Corporationstarted in 1980s and I had several encounters with it during my jobs in 1990s; not to forget the LSI chips I used to see in desktops and other electronic systems, and I’m happy to see LSI continuing today with more vigour having leadership position in storage and networking space. It provides highly reliable, high … Read More
Hardware/Software Debug
One of the big challenges with modern SoCs is that they have a complex software component as well as the hardware itself being complex. Some aspects of the hardware can be debugged independently of the software and vice versa, but often it is not immediately clear whether the source of a problem is hardware, software or some interaction… Read More
The Number One ASIC Racing Team!
This weekend I was in the pits for the Flying Lizard Motorsports team at the Monterey Grand Prix. It was an auction item (donated by eSilicon) at EDA’s 50[SUP]th[/SUP] Anniversary party last year, and let me tell you it was an amazing experience and a very interesting story, absolutely. But first let me tell you that if you get a “Hot… Read More
Leveraging Design Team Energy!
Once upon a time, in 1987 to be specific, a French design team was trying to develop a 100% Made in France supercomputer. In fact, not really 100%, as the CPU chips were supposed to be made by Weitek, but we never saw any of these chips, probably too challenging to be designed right first time! Anyway, I was in charge of the design of the … Read More
Aldec is Celebrating 30 Years @ #51DAC!
Dr. Stanley Hyduke founded Aldec in 1984 and their first product was delivered in 1985, named SUSIE (Standard Universal Simulator for Improved Engineering), a gate-level, DOS-based simulator. The SUSIE simulator was priced lower than other EDA vendor tools from the big three: Daisy, Mentor and Valid (aka DMV). Today, Aldec … Read More
FD-SOI : SMIC or…Who else?
In fact, as of today, nobody can refer to an official statement made by any STM executive about name of the foundry able to process FD-SOI wafers in 28nm. We just know that the agreement is about to (or has been) signed… But we may speculate, and try to use our rational thinking. For example, the Semiwiki readers had the opportunity to… Read More
More “toddlers” innovating on the IoT
As the PC Era took shape, Tom Peters predicted the shift away from “where all the cars are parked”. He foresaw that large, established companies would no longer be the economic engine, or the dominant force in innovation. Smaller firms, even individuals, would rise to prominence in a new, technologically-driven economy.
That … Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?