Grenoble is French city well-known within the Semiconductor industry to be one of the last location counting wafer fabs, not only in France but in fact in Europe. Back in the 70’s, under French government impulse, through the Commisariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA) and the LETI subsidiary in charge of Electronic related research,… Read More




Workload-tuned cores seeing greater interest
Is it possible to design a processor with very high performance and low power consumption? To answer that, embedded illuminati are now focusing on designs tuned to specific workloads – creating a tailored processor that does a few things very efficiently, with nothing extra.… Read More
The Future of Mobile Semiconductor Devices
During my trip to Taiwan I hopped on over to Hong Kong for a speaking engagement. One of the things I do as an “Internationally Recognized Industry Expert” is help the financial world understand the semiconductor landscape as it pertains to SoCs and mobile devices. Usually I do this over the phone or in writing but I prefer to do it in… Read More
Today’s Program is Brought To You by the Letter A
What do nVidia, Freescale and GlobalFoundries have in common? They are semiconductor companies? They are ARM licensees? They are doing 28nm chips? They all have the letter ‘a’ in their names?
All true, but that’s not what I was thinking of. But the letter ‘a’ is a clue since Apache (and Ansys) begin with ‘a’. All three companies have… Read More
SoC Constraints, Design & Verification at DAC
I hadn’t followed EDA start-up company Ausdiamuch before, so at DAC I met with Sam Appleton, CEO to find out what they are all about.
Sanjay Lall, Sam Appleton – Ausdia
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Design Test and Regression Management of SoCs
Eric Peersfounded Missing Link tools in 2008 and his company was acquiredby Methodics in 2012, so I met with him at DAC to understand how their EDA tools for Design, Test and Regression Management are used in an SoC design.
Eric Peers, Methodics… Read More
Speeding Design Closure at DAC
At DAC you can measure buzz by how many people are crowded into your booth. I saw a crowd at the Oasys booth, so stopped to take in their 10 minute overview presentation. Here’s what I learned.… Read More
Analysis of Power, Thermal, EM, IR at DAC
Most EDA start-up companies have a narrow product focus to complement existing tool flows, however Invarian is taking a much bolder approach by offering tools for:
- Power analysis
- Thermal analysis
- EM / IR analysis
- 3D Thermal analysis
Analog FastSPICE at DAC
Berkeley DA coined the phrase “Analog FastSPICE”, and I’ve been getting an update from them at DAC for several years now. In Austin I met with Paul Estradathe COO and Patrick Muyshondt.
Paul Estrada
Paul Estrada, COO (circa 2010)
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HW Prototyping and HLS at DAC
I love it when EDA companies send their engineers to DAC because I learn more of the unvarnished truth about their products. I met with Bill Thomas of Aldec to get an update on their HW prototyping boards, then two NEC engineers to learn about High Level Synthesis.
HW Prototyping
Bill Thomas, Research Engineer at Aldec
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Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing