The Internet of Things is on every technology mind these days, but what does it mean for the EDA community? Dennis Brophy of Mentor Graphics says the billions of things we are hearing about will not happen unless we find a way to build a lot more things, efficient things, and connected things. He has more thoughts in our recent interview.… Read More





Interface Protocols, USB3, PCI Express, MIPI, DDRn… the winner and losers in 2013
How to best forecast a specific protocol adoption? One option is to look at the various IP sales, it will give you a good idea of the number of SoC or IC offering this feature on the market in the next 12 months. Once again, if you wait for the IP sale to have reached a maximum, it will be too late, so you have to monitor the IP sales dynamic when… Read More
Meeting the Challenges of Designing Internet of Things SoCs with the Right Design Flow and IP
Connecting “things” to the Internet and enabling sensing and remote control, data gathering, transmission, and analysis improves many areas: safety and quality of life, healthcare, manufacturing and service delivery, energy efficiency, and the environment. The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) is quickly becoming… Read More
5 Rules of Power Management Using NoCs
If it has escaped your notice that power management on SoCs is important then you need to get out more. Increasingly, the complexity of the interconnect between the various processors, memories, offload processors, devices, interfaces and other blocks means that the best way to implement it is to use a network on chip (NoC). But… Read More
Design Methodology and its Impact on the Future of Electronics
Today at the Semisrael Expo 2013 (in Israel of course) Ajoy Bose gave a keynote on how design methodology will impact electronics. The big pictures is that microelectronics is driven by some major disruptive forces and, as a result, technology and industry are evolving dramatically, which creates a need for research and innovation… Read More
Raptor Image Signal Processor
This fall there seems to be a bumper harvest of cores. Today Imagination Technologies announced their latest core for image signal processing. Like all of their cores, it is designed to be part of an SoC and is designed to work with other Imagination cores to build a complete image processing system. In particular, it is designed … Read More
Cadence Design Systems’ Shares Are Surprisingly Cheap
In the third and final (for now) part of this series on the EDA design tool vendors, I’d like to take a closer look at Cadence Design Systems. This is probably the most interesting of the three from both an industry perspective as well as an investment perspective for a variety of reasons. With that said I’d like to first provide some … Read More
A Brief History of eSilicon
eSilicon Corporation was founded in 2000 with Jack Harding as the founding CEO and Seth Neiman of Crosspoint Venture Partners as the first venture investor and outside Board member. They both remain involved in the company today, with Jack continuing as CEO and Seth now serving as Chairman of the Board.
Both Harding and Neiman brought… Read More
Social Media at Synopsys
When I talk about social media and mention Synopsys you may quickly think of Karen Bartleson, the Senior Director of Community Marketing, because she:
- Blogs and podcasts
- Created the best interactive DAC game ever in 2013 using barcodes and points
- Tweets @karenbartleson
- Is president of the IEEE Standards Association
- Has over
TowerJazz and Silvaco BFF
Last week was the TowerJazz Technology Fair 2013. TowerJazz is the fourth biggest foundry in the world after TSMC, GF and UMC. They have fabs in Newport Beach (the old Jazz, itself with roots in Rockwell), two in Israel (the old Tower, with roots in National Semiconductor) and one in Japan (acquired from Micron). The technology fair… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography