OpenVX is the next open source sample specification to be launched by Khronos group, a consortium building a family of interoperating APIs for portable and power efficient vision processing. If you take a look at the OpenVX participant list, you can check that the major chip makers: Broadcom, Qualcomm, TI, Intel, Nvidia, Renesas,… Read More




The Future of Intel
There have been a lot of articles and discussion on SemiWiki about Intel. These articles have all been written from the perspective of an outsider commenting on what Intel is doing, or should or shouldn’t be doing. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how Intel got to where they currently are, what their current strengths… Read More
International CES: Day One
Semiconductor Intelligence will be attending the International CES this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) puts on the show each year. The CEA insists the meeting be called “International CES” and states “CES” no longer stands for Consumer Electronics Show. The… Read More
Mission Critical Role of Unmanned Systems – How to fulfill?
Do we ever imagine what kind of severe challenges mission critical unmanned systems in air, land and underwater face? They are limited in space and size; have to be light in weight, flexible in different types of operations and at the same time rugged enough to work in extreme climatic conditions. That’s not enough; amidst these … Read More
Innovations that will change our lives in the next five years
The theme of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” comes from the Steve Jobs quote,“You can’t really understand now if you don’t know what came before.” After chronicling the rise of the semiconductor industry and transformation to the fabless business model we ask in the final chapter, … Read More
Structured Asic Dies…Again
There has always been a dream that you could do a design in a cheap easy to design technology and then, if the design was a hit, press a button and instantly move it into a cheaper unit-price high volume design. When I was at VLSI in the 1980s we had approaches to make it easy to move gate arrays (relatively large die area) into standard cells… Read More
New Frontiers in Scan Diagnosis
As we move down into more and more advanced process nodes, the rules of how we test designs are having to change. One big challenge is the requirement to zoom in and fix problems by doing root cause analysis on test data alone, along with the rest of the design data such as detailed layout, optical proximity correction and so on. But without… Read More
Mastering the Magic of Multi-Patterning
I’ve been quite impressed that modern ICs use a lithography process with 193nm light sources to resolve final feature sizes at 20nm and smaller dimensions. We’ve been blogging about Double Patterning Technology (DPT) some 45 times in the past few years that enable 20nm fabrication, so one big question for me is, “How… Read More
NoC, NoC: Your Chip May Be Under Attack
SoCs face a lot of issues related to security and the Network-on-Chip (NoC) is in a good position to facilitate system-wide services. SoCs are now so complex that one of the challenges is to make sure that the chip does what it is meant to do and doesn’t do what it isn’t meant to do. Just as in software, security used to be … Read More
Somebody at the NSA has a sense of humor
We have to go way back in the annals of entertainment history to find the origin of the word “Jeep”, not just a term of endearment hung on a WWII utility vehicle. Pictured is Eugene the Jeep, a mystical creature belonging to the 4th Dimension, who first appeared to torment Popeye the Sailor in 1936.… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot