Humor can arise in surprising ways and yet still be disguised to many. As I was researching Qualcomm the other day, I came upon the transcript of their last quarterly earnings and I had to laugh. In the midst of last summer’s European crises, when the Club Med (Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal) Sovereign Debt was trying to be rolled… Read More




What is a Hierarchical SPICE Circuit Simulator?
Hierarchy is used in IC designs at many abstraction levels to help describe a design in a compact format:
- Mask Data
- IC Layout
- Schematic Netlists
- Gate level netlists
- RTL netlists
But the question and focus for this blog is, “What is a hierarchical SPICE Circuit Simulator?”… Read More
NoC for faster SoC integration
The need for Network-on-Chip (NoC) has appeared at the time where chip makers realized that they could really integrate a complete system on a single die to build a System-on-Chip (SoC). I was in charge of the development of a large IC, integrating different type of functions (Analog and Digital) to support advanced TV application.… Read More
Apple 4S nearly catches up to Android, perhaps
Apple’s iPhone did well in Q4 according to Neilsen who polled recent buyers of smartphones. Of people who had purchased a smartphone in the previous 3 months (roughly Q4) 44.5% chose an iPhone (up from 25.1% in October, roughly Q3). But Android retained the lead with a 46.9% share, down from 61.6% in October. How many phones… Read More
Low-power IC design in Switzerland
My wife and I have traveled to Switzerland on vacation and marveled at the natural beauty of the mountains, efficient train system, tasty chocolate, and wonderful foods. I only wished that our American dollar bought more in Swiss currency than it did. Recently I discovered a high-tech IC design company called Microdul that designs… Read More
NFC, Why is this a big deal?
NFCis all over the news. Payments from your phone, yeah! I was wondering why this is a big deal, and why it has taken so long to gain momentum. I was issued a RFID enabled employee badge (JavaCard) 10 years ago while working at Sun. RFID is now so prevalent that Walmart attaches RFID tags to clothes. I spent an hour wading around the internet… Read More
Addressing the Challenges of Tomorrow’s SoC Design
For the next few days Atrenta is running a series of 30 minute live webinars to discuss the new solutions and approaches that are required to improve the way SoC designs are created and modified.
The webinars are at the following times:
- Jan 17th, 7-7.30am PST (sorry you missed that one)
- January 18th 7.30-8pm PST (and January 19th in
Chip-Package-System workshops
Chips, packages and circuit boards (systems, hence CPS) used to be three separate domains with their own tools that barely interacted at all. If you were lucky, reassigning a pin on a package wouldn’t have to be done manually in all 3 places. But now, from a signal integrity, noise, power point of view these three domains must… Read More
What products shown at CES will drive electronics and semiconductor growth in 2012?
The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week in Las Vegas, Nevada was the largest in history, with over 3,100 exhibitors and over 153,000 attendees – over 20% international. Hopefully this was a good sign of a solid recovery in the electronics and semiconductor industries. The major Japanese and Korean consumer… Read More
Silicon IP has taken over CAE in EDAC results… showing how bad have been analyst in forecasting the IP market!
Thanks to Paul, who has shared EDAC resultsfor Q3 2011, we can see that Silicon IP has definitely passed CAE revenue! It does not appears clearly ($410 million for IP, 566.7 for CAE), but when you consider that ARM, among many other IP vendors, is not part of EDAC, it’s easy to see that SIP revenue is higher than CAE (ARM revenue for 2010… Read More
TSMC Describes Technology Innovation Beyond A14