While eyes remain fixated on the architectural battle between Intel and ARM, a second front is soon about to open up that will determine mobile supremacy for the rest of the decade. Whereas yesterday’s story on the collapse of Wintel and the anointing of Google and Samsung are repeated endlessly, now tables are being set for a significant… Read More




GPU vs. FPGA
I just don’t understand it? My kids love surprises but I have yet to find management that does, go figure but boy during a review they can really spring them on ya! What surprises me is the absurdness of my title, GPU vs. FPGA. FPGAs are not GPUs and likewise but none the less there is the push to make a fit where nature does not allow. I liken… Read More
SoC Sign-off, Real Intent at DAC
Monday morning at DAC I met with Real Intent to get an update on their SoC sign-off tools:
- Dr. Prakash Narain, President and CEO
- Graham Bell, Sr. Dir. Mktg.
Years ago Prakash was at IBM the only two years that they attended DAC, in an attempt to offer their internal EDA tools to the EDA marketplace. Graham worked at Nassda marketing the… Read More
IC Design for Implantable Devices Treating Epilepsy
I’m utterly amazed at how IC-based products are improving our quality of life by implantable devices. The modern day pacemaker has given people added years of life by electrically stimulating the heart. A privately-held company called NeuroPace was founded in Mountain View, California to treat epilepsy by using responsive… Read More
First FinFETs Manufactured at #50DAC!
This was my 30[SUP]th[/SUP] DAC and the second most memorable. The most memorable was my second DAC (1985) in Las Vegas with my new bride. We had a romantic evening ending with ice cream sundaes at midnight that we still talk about. This year SemiWiki had Dr. Paul McLellan, Dr. Eric Esteve, Daniel Payne, Don Dingee, Randy Smith, and… Read More
Metastability and Fatal System Errors
Metastability is an inescapable phenomenon in digital electronic systems. This phenomenon has been known to cause fatal system errors for half a century. Over the years, designers have used convenient rules of thumb for designing synchronizers to mitigate it. However, as digital circuits have become more complex, smaller … Read More
DAC IP Workshop: Are You Ready For Quality Control?
On Sunday I attended an IP workshop which was presented by TSMC, Atrenta, Sonics and IPextreme. It turns out that the leitmotiv of the afternoon was SpyGlass.
Dan Kochpatcharin of TSMC was first up and gave a little bit of history of the company. They built up their capacity over the years, as I’ve written about before, and last… Read More
Hierarchical Design Management – A Must
Considering the technological progress, economical pressure, increased outsourcing and IP re-use, semiconductor industry is one of the most challenged industry today. Very frequently products get outdated leading to new development cycles. It becomes very difficult and costly to build the whole scheme of data foundation… Read More
Reshoring Semiconductor Manufacturing
So where in the world do you think semiconductor manufacturing is increasing the fastest? OK, Taiwan, that was pretty easy. But in second place, with over 20% of the world’s semiconductor equipment capital investment is the US. Growing faster than Europe, China, Japan and equal with Korea.
This was not the case half a dozen… Read More
ARM: AMBA 5, Cortex-A12, Mali, video, POP…
ARM announced several new products at DAC in a number of different spaces. In addition I got invited to a briefing with Simon Segars, 30 days from when he takes over as CEO of ARM. I asked Simon if he expected to make any major changes and he basically said ‘no’. ARM’s basic strategy in both mobile and now enterprise… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing