As RTL designs in FPGA-based ASIC prototypes get bigger and bigger, the visibility into what is happening inside the IP is dropping at a frightening rate. Where designers once had several hundred observation probes per million gates, those same several hundred probes – or fewer if deeper signal captures are needed – are now spread… Read More
WEBINAR: Intrinsic Techniques in RF Power Amplifier DesignLoad-pull power amplifier (PA) design techniques determine the…Read More
Analog Bits Demos Real-Time On-Chip Power Sensing and Delivery on N2P at the TSMC 2026 Technology SymposiumAnalog Bits has a way of stealing the…Read More
Disaggregating LLM Inference: Inside the SambaNova Intel Heterogeneous Compute BlueprintSambaNova Systems and Intel have introduced a blueprint…Read More
CEO Interview with Johan Wadenholt Vrethem of VoxoWith over two decades of experience bridging technology…Read More
TSMC to Elon Musk: There are no Shortcuts in Building Fabs!The opening of the TSMC 2026 earning call…Read MoreA Most Significant Man
Most of us live perfectly good lives without distinction, fame, or note. Others rack up the honors, filling their walls and resumes with recognition of their brilliance. Like Dr. Janusz Rajski.
Rajski is the director of engineering for the test products at Mentor Graphics, an IEEE Fellow, and the inventor of embedded deterministic… Read More
Did the MIPS acquisition just doom Vivante?
By now, you’ve probably read about the Imagination Technologies acquisition of MIPS somewhere, hopefully in the Eric Esteve article here. There’s an interesting side effect not being talked about much.… Read More
Should ARM care about MIPS acquisition?
It was not really a surprise to learn that, finally, MIPS have been sold, as the company was officially for sale since April 2012. Nevertheless, the interesting part of this news comes from the buyer’ identity: Imagination Technologies. Imagination is an UK based company, like ARM, selling processor IP cores, like ARM, but the … Read More
Waiting or EUV – Another View on the ReRAM Roadmap
It is ‘Quarterly’ financial report time for many companies and one can occasionally find some interesting snippets in the transcripts of the calls which normally accompany these announcements. For example, SanDisk appear to have an encouraging quarter, reversing sales declines seen through Q1 and Q2. However, what caught … Read More
Gustafson on Parallel Algorithms
At the keynote for ICCAD this morning, John Gustafson of AMD (where he is Chief Graphics Product Architect as well as a Fellow) talked about parallel algorithms. Like Gene Amdahl, whose law states that parallel algorithms are limited by the part that cannot be parallelized (if 10% is serial, then even if the other part takes place… Read More
16nm FinFET versus 20nm Planar!
The common theme amongst semiconductor ecosystem conferences this year is FinFETS, probably the most exciting technology we will see this decade. A lot has been written on SemiWiki about FinFETS, it is one of the top trending search terms, but there is some confusion about the process naming so let me attempt to explain.
In planar… Read More
Chip On Wafer On Substrate (CoWoS)
Our EDA industry loves three letter acronyms so credit the same industry for creating a five letter acronym CoWoS. Two weeks ago TSMC announced tape-out of their first CoWoS test chip integrating with JEDEC Wide I/O mobile DRAM interface, making me interested enough to read more about it. At the recent TSMC Open Innovation Platform… Read More
Electromigration (EM) with an Electrically-Aware IC Design Flow
Electromigration (EM) is a reliability concern for IC designers because a failure in the field could spell disaster as in lost human life or even bankruptcy for a consumer electronics company. In the old days of IC design we would follow a sequential and iterative design process of:… Read More
ARM TechCon 2012 Trip Report
I must say the ARM conference gets better every year, as do the attendance numbers. More than 4,000 people showed up including 5 SemiWiki bloggers, two of which I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting.
First I have to mention my favorite vendor booth. I don’t remember what company it was but the girls in fishnet stockings giving out… Read More


Is Intel About to Take Flight?