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Morris Chang on Altera and Intel

Morris Chang on Altera and Intel
by Daniel Nenni on 04-25-2013 at 7:00 pm


If you want to know why I have written so much about TSMC in the past five years here it is: TSMC executives are approachable, personable, answer questions straight on, and have yet to lead me astray. If you want an example of this read the Chairman’s comments on the TSMC Q1 2013 earnings call transcript.

“On 16-nanometer FinFET, we Read More


Best Practice for RTL Power Design for Mobile

Best Practice for RTL Power Design for Mobile
by Paul McLellan on 04-25-2013 at 11:54 am

Mobile devices are taking over the world. If you want lots of graphs and data then look at Mary Meeker’s presentation that I blogged about earlier this week. The graph on the right is just one datapoint, showing that mobile access to the internet is probably up to about 15% now from a standing start 5 years ago.

Of course, one obvious… Read More


Bring high end camera image quality to smartphone

Bring high end camera image quality to smartphone
by Eric Esteve on 04-25-2013 at 9:13 am

We have to go back to 2008 to understand why Super Resolution is desperately needed by smartphone users, expecting to take high quality pictures with their smartphone, at least as good quality as with their camera. It’s in 2008 that smartphone worldwide shipments have surpassed standalone compact camera shipments… and we don’t… Read More


10 to 100X faster HDL Simulation Speeds

10 to 100X faster HDL Simulation Speeds
by Daniel Payne on 04-24-2013 at 10:44 am

Speed, capacity, accuracy – these are the three major EDA tool metrics that we pay attention to and that enable us to design and verify an SoC. Talk to any design or verification engineer and ask if they are satisfied with the time that it takes to simulate their latest design, or to verify that it meets spec and is functionally… Read More


ESD – Key issue for IC reliability, how to prevent?

ESD – Key issue for IC reliability, how to prevent?
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-23-2013 at 8:30 pm

It’s a common electrical rule that when large amount of charge gets accumulated, it tries to break any of its surrounding isolation. Although it wouldn’t have been prominent in 1980s or 90s, protection for ICs from such damaging effects is a must, specifically in large mixed-signal designs of today, working at different voltages… Read More


Gigahertz FFT rates on a 500MHz budget

Gigahertz FFT rates on a 500MHz budget
by Don Dingee on 04-23-2013 at 8:30 pm

A basic building block of any communication system today is the fast Fourier transform, or FFT. A big advantage of FPGA implementations of FFTs is they can be scaled and tuned for the task at hand, optimizing data flow, resource use, and power consumption. Scaled, that is, up to the clock speed of the FPGA – or so it would seem.

Today’s… Read More


CDN Live 2013 in Munich: what’s the next acquisition?

CDN Live 2013 in Munich: what’s the next acquisition?
by Eric Esteve on 04-23-2013 at 8:10 pm

Going to Munich in May could be a very good idea, as it will give you the opportunity to listen to the keynote talk from Lip-Bu Tan. Who knows if you will learn in direct live the name of the next acquisition from Cadence in 2013, after Tensilica and Cosmic Circuits? In fact, there may not be new acquisition announcement, then this keynote… Read More


Mary Meeker’s Annual Internet Trends is Out

Mary Meeker’s Annual Internet Trends is Out
by Paul McLellan on 04-23-2013 at 8:05 pm

Every year, analyst Mary Meeker produces a large presentation (88 slides this year) about internet trends. This year’s oneis just out. So much of the semiconductor industry is driven by trends in mobile and PCs. Increasingly, just by mobile since it has already overtaken PCs in terms of units and will soon overtake in terms… Read More


Mentor Graphics’ Best User2User Ever

Mentor Graphics’ Best User2User Ever
by Beth Martin on 04-23-2013 at 5:45 pm

Calling all Mentor users! Don’t forget to register for the U2U in San Jose on Thursday, April 25.

In addition to three worthy keynotes, you will find a more interactive and solution-focused day than in the past. There are sessions on place & route, custom/AMS, emulation, test and yield analysis, functional verification, Calibre… Read More


Forte Rises

Forte Rises
by Randy Smith on 04-23-2013 at 3:00 am

Over the past few months there has been a bit of back-and-forth concerning the 2012 market data indicating that Forte Designs Systems had taken over the top spot (by revenue) in the high-level synthesis (HLS) market (see stories hereand here). Having worked in this segment for Synfora as VP of Marketing, and as a consultant to AutoESL,… Read More