Apple’s legal victory over Samsung has been analyzed in thousands of articles and TWEETs since last Friday’s announcement and surely more will follow. Most of the commentary has focused on the first order impact to handset manufacturers. It is not entirely clear how it will all settle but there are sure to be secondary ramifications… Read More
Silicon Catalyst: Searching for the Next Great Start-upSilicon Catalyst has emerged as a distinctive force…Read More
Revolutionizing Hardware Design Debugging with Time Travel TechnologyIn the semiconductor industry High-Level Synthesis (HLS) and…Read More
Addressing Silent Data Corruption (SDC) with In-System Embedded Deterministic TestingSilent Data Corruption (SDC) represents a critical challenge…Read More
TSMC's 6th ESG AWARD Receives over 5,800 Proposals, Igniting Sustainability PassionTaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has once again demonstrated…Read More
Tiling Support in SiFive's AI/ML Software Stack for RISC-V Vector-Matrix ExtensionAt the 2025 RISC-V Summit North America, Min…Read MoreA Brief History of FPGAs
From the transistor to the integrated circuit to the ASIC, next comes programmable logic devices on the road to the mainstream fabless semiconductor industry. PLDS started in the early 1970’s from the likes of Motorola, Texas Instruments, and IBM but it wasn’t until Xilinx brought us the field programmable gate array (FPGA)… Read More
SpringSoft Laker vs Tanner EDA L-Edit
Daniel Payne recently blogged some of the integration challenges facing Synopsys with their impending acquisition of SpringSoft. On my way back from San Diego last week I stopped by Tanner EDA to discuss an alternative tool flow for users who find themselves concerned about the Laker Custom Layout road map.
Design of the analog… Read More
IP Wanna Go Fast, Core Wanna Not Rollover
At a dinner table a couple years ago, someone quietly shared their biggest worry in EDA. Not 2GHz, or quad core. Not 20nm, or 450mm. Not power, or timing closure. Call it The Rollover. It’s turned out to be the right worry.
Best brains spent inordinate hours designing and verifying a big, hairy, heavy breathing processor core to do … Read More
A Brief History of ASIC, part II
All semiconductor companies were caught up in ASIC in some way or another because of the basic economics. Semiconductor technology allowed medium sized designs to be done, and medium sized designs were pretty much all different. The technology didn’t yet allow whole systems to be put on a single chip. So semiconductor companies… Read More
Book Review: Mixed-Signal Methodology Guide
Almost every SoC has multiple analog blocks so AMS methodology is an important topic to our growing electronics industry. Authored by Jess Chen (Qualcomm), Michael Henrie (Cliosoft), Monte Mar (Boeing) and Mladen Nizic (Cadence), the book is subtitled: Advanced Methodology for AMS IP and SoC Design, Verification and Implementation… Read More
Book Review: Mixed-Signal Methodology guide
Almost every SoC has multiple analog blocks so AMS methodology is an important topic to our growing electronics industry. Authored by Jess Chen (Qualcomm), Michael Henrie (Cliosoft), Monte Mar (Boeing) and Mladen Nizic (Cadence), the book is subtitled: Advanced Methodology for AMS IP and SoC Design, Verification and Implementation… Read More
ARM + Broadcom + Linux = Raspberry Pi
Broadcom has designed an impressive SOC named the BCM2835 with the following integrated features:
- ARM CPU at 700MHz
- GPU – VideoCore IV
- RAM – 256 MB
The British chaps at Raspberry Pi have created a $35.00 Linux-based computer based on the Broadcom BCM2835 chip that is tiny in size but big in utility:… Read More
Debugging Subtle Cache Problems
When I worked for virtual platform companies, one of the things that I used to tell prospective customers was that virtual prototypes were not some second-rate approach to software and hardware development to be dropped the moment real silicon was available, that in many ways they were better than the real hardware since they had… Read More
Synopsys up to $1.75B
Synopsys announced their results today. With Magma rolled in (but not yet SpringSoft since that hasn’t technically closed) they had revenue of $443M up 15% from $387M last year. This means that they are all but a $1.75B company and a large part of the entire EDA industry (which I think of as being $5B or so, depending on just what… Read More


Quantum Advantage is About the Algorithm, not the Computer