Jen Hsun Huang, the CEO of nVidia, has a phrase he often repeats to his employees: “We are 30 days from going out of business.” With product cycles as short as 6 months, the troops are on a constant march to revenue. The earnings conference call on August 11th highlighted two critical pieces of information. First, is the success that… Read More
Altera and Xilinx Eyeing 28nm FPGA Dominance
28nm FPGAs are finally hitting the market and the next round in the battle between Altera and Xilinx is heating up. At 40nm, Altera beat Xilinx out the door by a year and as a consequence won a lot of new sockets in the high end Communications market. In the past year, Altera has closed the revenue and market share gap with Xilinx. This … Read More
How Tektronix uses Hardware Configuration Management tools in an IC flow
Last Monday I sat down with Grego Sanguinetti in Beaverton, Oregon at the campus of Tektronix to hear about how they design their ICs using EDA tools from multiple vendors.… Read More
Reducing SoC Power Consumption using Integrated Voltage Regulators
Last month I had the pleasure of meeting Mr Wonyoung Kim, a PhD candidate from Harvard University. Like many candidates, Wonyoung is shopping his thesis for capital in hopes of starting a semiconductor IP company. Here is a brief summary of the technology, please provide appropriate feedback and let’s see if we can get him… Read More
Best EDA company for work life balance?
What was the first EDA company name that came to your mind after reading that title?
At Forbes magazine they rated both Mentor Graphics and Synopsys in the top 25 best companies for work life balance.
That’s quite an honor for both Mentor and Synopsys so I can say that EDA dominated the list this year.
Here are some of the factors… Read More
Yalta in EDA: but Synopsys ultra dominant in Interface IP territory…
If Cadence is making money with large VIP port-folio, Synopsys has successfully deployed an acquisition strategy to build a large Design IP port-folio. Looking at these acquisitions will help understanding Synopsys positioning in the IP market. When they have started this acquisition campaign, back in 2002, their market share… Read More
Speeding Verification of FPGA Prototype Boards
It is no secret that SoC designs continue to increase in complexity and time-to-market windows are shrinking. While there is room for debate on just how big a fraction of SoC design effort goes on verification, there is no debating that it is a large part of the total. Simulation is increasingly too slow, especially when software … Read More
Fun Break
At DAC SpringSoft had a couple of video games set up, one about functional verification and one about, surprise, physical layout. But you didn’t need to go to DAC, you can play them now:
Liberate your Layout
Smartphones shipments, Sky is the limit…
…or a global recession, but that’s not the purpose of this blog. As everybody knows, Apple is designing and selling smartphones, only. Does it mean that only smartphones are generating profit in the mobile industry? As we have seen recently in Semiwiki, Apple makes 2/3 of profit of entire mobile industry.
Let’s have a look (below)… Read More
Samsung to Acquire AMD?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of AMD, I buy AMD based products whenever possible to prevent an innovation stifling Intel monopoly. Unfortunately Silicon Valley coffee house conversations continue to paint a bleak picture for AMD, even with a recent stock surge on better than expected revenue guidance for the rest of 2011. I’m… Read More
Podcast EP267: The Broad Impact Weebit Nano’s ReRAM is having with Coby Hanoch