I have often written in Semiwiki about high speed PHY IP supporting Interface protocols (see for example this blog), the SoC cornerstone, almost as crucial as CPU, GPU or SDRAM Memory Controller. When you architect a SoC, you first select CPU(s) and/or GPU(s) to support the system basic functionality (Processor for Mobile application,… Read More
Securing RISC-V Third-Party IP: Enabling Comprehensive CWE-Based Assurance Across the Design Supply Chainby Jagadish Nayak RISC-V adoption continues to accelerate…Read More
Apple’s iPhone 17 Series 5G mmWave Antenna Module Revealed to be Powered by Soitec FD-SOI SubstratesRecent independent teardown and technical analyses have confirmed…Read More
Advancing Automotive Memory: Development of an 8nm 128Mb Embedded STT-MRAM with Sub-ppm Reliability IEDM 2025 Papers MRAM…Read More
AI Drives Strong Semiconductor Market in 2025-2026The global semiconductor market in 2025 was $792…Read More
How Customized Foundation IP Is Redefining Power Efficiency and Semiconductor ROIAs computing expands from data centers to edge…Read MoreARM Lab in a Box
St. Francis Xavier said “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” ARM is not going for them quite that young but this week they announced their “lab in a box” for participating universities worldwide. It is actually a joint launch between the ARM University Program (which is not new)… Read More
Baskin-Robbins Only has 31 Flavors. Atmel has 505 Microcontrollers
Actually these days even Baskin-Robbins has more, but not 505. But as it says in the title, Atmel have 505 different microcontrollers. That’s a lot. Some are AVR, both 8 bit and 32 bit, and some are various flavors of ARM (all 32 bit) ranging from older parts like the ARM9 to various flavors of Cortex ranging from the M0 (tiny microcontroller… Read More
Xilinx vs. Altera DSP
Did you know in the Xilinx Virtex 28nm series you can REALLY run the DSP at 741 MHz? I say ‘really’ as you know dear reader, not all the FPGA claims of speed and usage tends to live up to reality. I cannot stand marketing games where you can run at a GHz ‘But’ and then comes the list of gotcha’s. Don’t believe me? Whaaat? Well let’s take a journey… Read More
Sir Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies, Keynote!
Semiconductor IP is a focus of this year’s Design Automation conference and I’m excited to see a keynote by one of the leaders of this market segment. Even more interesting, Dr. Hossein Yassaie was knighted by the Queen in Her Majesty’s New Year Honours 2013. The award was given in recognition of his services to technology… Read More
Effect of Inductance on Interconnect
In previous design generations interconnect could safely be modeled by extraction using just R and C values. Parasitics in interconnect are important because they can affect the operating frequency or phase error in circuits like VCO’s. The need to model parasitics properly in wires is just as applicable in PA’s, LNA’s and for… Read More
Gobi, the Jewel in Qualcomm’s Crown
Back in the 1990s in the middle of the 2G GSM era, cell-phone manufacturers would display a “triangle of difficulty” with a large base labeled radio, a middle smaller part labeled baseband and a little triangle on top labelled software. The idea was that the radio was incredibly difficult, then the baseband chip and… Read More
GlobalFoundries Fab 8: Jobs
GlobalFoundries was created by spinning out the manufacturing side of AMD’s semiconductor business. Initially the company was jointly owned by AMD and by the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) which is an investment arm of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. A couple of years ago ATIC bought out the remaining share from… Read More
Locked on FPGA design brand recognition
Back in the days where computing was dominated by a few big (and now mostly dearly departed) names, there was a saying: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” The relative safety of immediate brand recognition, especially among non-technical upper management, dissuaded many users from recommending or even seeking out other … Read More
Synopsys’s Next Generation Emulator, ZeBu Server-3
Since Synopsys acquired Eve over a year ago, they haven’t announced anything new in the ZeBu product line. Emulators are not like software where you expect incremental releases a couple of times per year, each new “release” is a complete re-design using new hardware fabric in a new process technology. Earlier… Read More


An AI-Native Architecture That Eliminates GPU Inefficiencies