GLOBALFOUNDRIES changed the landscape of the foundry business in 2009 with a simple but ambitious plan to become the world’s first truly global foundry. At the Common Platform Technology Forum February 5th in the Santa Clara Convention Center GF Executive Vice President Michael Noonen will give an update on how that is … Read More





High Performance or Cycle Accuracy? You can have both
SoC designers have always wanted to simulate hardware and software together during new product development, so one practical question has been how to trade off performance versus accuracy when creating an early model of the hardware. The creative minds at Carbon Design Systems and ARM have combined to offer us some hope and relief… Read More
Apple Makes More on iPhone Than Samsung on Everything
Apple’s stock is down 10% after they announced “disappointing” results. They are only disappointing in the sense that some analysts expected even bigger profits. At $13.08 billion it is the largest quarterly profit for any corporation that is not in the oil business ever. According to wikipedia, even the … Read More
A Brief History of Sidense
Sidense Corp. is a leading developer of embedded non-volatile memory (NVM) intellectual property (IP) for the semiconductor IC market. The company is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, and has a global presence with sales offices worldwide.
The company was founded in 2004 by CTO Wlodek Kurjanowicz, a MoSys fellow and co-founder… Read More
Power, Signal and Thermal Updates from ANSYS at DesignCon
DesignConis next week in Santa Clara, so today I spoke with Mark Ravenstahlfrom ANSYS to get an idea of what to expect at the conference and trade show.
How to manage decreasing by 70% a $5B IC business in less than 6 years? TI knows the answer…
The Wireless Business Unit (WBU) from TI was created in the mid 90’s to structure the chip business in wireless handset made with customers like Nokia, Ericsson or Alcatel. I had a deep look at the WBU results: quickly growing from $1B in 2000 to reach about $5B in 2005… to finally decrease by 70%, down to $1.3B in 2012.
Let’s make it clear:… Read More
The Linley Microprocessor Conference: Weather Cloudy
The Linley Group’s Microprocessor conference in Spring is focused on Datacenters now that cloud computing and massive internal datacenters has made them so important. The conference is on February 5th and 6th. It is free to qualified people such as network equipment vendors, network service providers and so on (which … Read More
You may want to check that known-good RTL
In his blog Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood wrote: “Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it’s not. Their job is to solve problems.” Whether the tool is HTML, C, or RTL, the reality is we are now borrowing or buying more software IP than ever, and integrating it into more complex designs,… Read More
Using IC Data Management Tools and Migrating Vendors
Non-volatile memory is used in a wide variety of consumer and industrial applications and comes in an array of architectures like Serial Flash and CBRAM (Conductive Bridging RAM). I caught up with Shane Hollmer by phone this week to gain some insight into a recent acquisition of Atmel’s serial flash components, and how that… Read More
Verdi: No Requiem for Openness
I sat down last week for lunch with Michael Sanie. Mike and I go back a long way, working together at VLSI Technology (where his first job out of school was to take over the circuit extractor that I’d originally written) and then in strategic marketing at Cadence. Now Mike has marketing for (almost?) all of Synopsys’s … Read More
RISC-V Virtualization and the Complexity of MMUs