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
Consolidation and Competition: Who is Winning the $4.5 Billion Interface IP Race?The semiconductor landscape is currently undergoing a structural…Read More
SemiAnalysis EDA Market Primer - Market Dynamics, Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens, China EDA RiseElectronic Design Automation, or EDA, is the software…Read More
Beyond Workflow Agents: Toward Design Intelligence in Analog EDAOver the last year, the EDA industry has…Read More
MooresLabAI at DAC 2026: Why the Future of Semiconductor Engineering Is Agentic, Not Just GenerativeFor decades, semiconductor innovation has been constrained not…Read MoreMetastability 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 Very frequently products get outdated leading to new development cycles.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
DAC: Tempus Lunch
I had time for lunch on Monday. That is to say, there was a Cadence panel session about Has Timing Signoff Innovation has become and Oxymoron? What Happened and How Do We Fix It?
The moderator was Brian Fuller, lately of EE Times but now Editor-in-Chief at Cadence (I’m not sure quite what it means either). On the panel were Dipesh… Read More
DAC: Wally’s Vision
One new feature at DAC this year is that several of the keynotes are preceded by a ten minute vision of the future from one of the EDA CEOs. Today it was Wally Rhines’s turn. Wally is CEO of Mentor Graphics. He titled his talk Changing the World Through EDA. Since EDA as we know it started in the late 1970s, the number of transistors… Read More
DAC: Gary Smith: Don’t Give Away Your Models
As is now traditional, Gary Smith kicked off DAC proper (there were workshops earlier and some co-located conferences started days before). He started by dismissing the idea that it costs $170M to do an SoC design.
In fact he looked at 3 different cases. Firstly, the completely unconstrained design. Well, no design is completely… Read More
Kaufman Award: Chenming Hu
This year’s Kaufman award winner is Chenming Hu. In contrast to previous years, this was presented on the Sunday evening of DAC instead of at a separate event in San Jose. Chenming’s career was reviewed by Klaus Schuegraf, Group Vice President of EUV Product Development at Cymer, Inc (now part of ASML) and also one of… Read More



Consolidation and Competition: Who is Winning the $4.5 Billion Interface IP Race?