I listened to Dan Niles’s quarterly report that he does for GSA. He had a lot of the usual background data on savings rates and GDP growth, but the big story is that everything changed on May 22nd and that this will turn out to be a very significant moment. That was the day that the Fed basically announced that it would start to “taper”… Read More




Aart: Technomic Push-Pull
Aart de Geus gave one of the visionary look to the next 50 years of EDA as a warmup to Stephen Wu’s keynote. EDA is enabling the greatest push-pull ever, part of an exponential change on a scale never before seen.
Technologies seem to go through a 50 year technical push phase (driven by improving the technology) followed by a 50… Read More
What is inside the iPhone5s? Samsung or TSMC?
As a semiconductor professional and an Apple customer I’m very interested to see what is inside the iPhone5s. Rumors are spreading, photos are leaking, creating a nice build up to the next release of the mobile device that changed the world.
Honestly, last year I was a bit disappointed with the iPhone5. Inside is the A6 SoC which uses… Read More
An EDA update from Dassault Systemes at DAC
I first met Michael Munseyback at Viewlogic in the 1990’s, so was pleased to meet with him at DACand get an update on what Dassault Systemes has to offer the EDA world.
Michael Munsey, Dassault Systemes
SPICE update from ProPlus at DAC
With EDA tool development in San Jose, Beijing and China, ProPlusis probably best known for their device modeling software called BSIMProPlus. At DAC I met with Lianfeng Yang, Ph.D. the VP of Marketing to hear about what’s new.
Lianfeng Yeng, ProPlus
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Circuit Simulation update from Cadence at DAC
I’m keenly interested in SPICE circuit simulators, so at DACI met with John Piercefrom Cadence to get an update on what’s new this year.
John Pierce, Cadence
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MIPS Warrior Goes Into Battle
You are probably aware that Imagination Technologies, perhaps most well known for creating the GPU that is in the iPhone and iPad, acquired MIPS, which was originally a spinout from Silicon Graphics and licenses a line of general purpose microprocessors.
MIPS considers that they have a purer implementation of the RISC philosophy… Read More
Can China alone drive semiconductor growth?
Production of electronic equipment (including computers, communications, consumer, etc.) has been sluggish over the last year in all key regions of the world except China. The chart below shows three-month-average change versus a year ago for electronics production in local currency through April 2013 (May 2013 for China).… Read More
Kathryn Kranen: The Problem with EDA is…
Kathryn Kranen, CEO of Jasper Design Automation, got to give her view of the future of EDA on the Thursday of DAC. For many years she has been on the EDAC board and is currently chair. When she first was on the board she talked to many of the stakeholders in the EDA ecosystem: EDA companies, IP companies, semiconductor companies, academics,… Read More
Remember FPGA Memory
We must admit the excitement of the FinFETs and all that coupled with the enormous amount of DSPs and BRAMs in the FPGA world is very cool. They even have ARMs, and I highly recommend that they get Legs then they can run around and everything and fit in with the rest of us. Perhaps the Feds can grant them immigration status and they could… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography