There has been a lot of press this past week surrounding the release of iPad2. While it has some significant improvements, they are, for the most part, incremental. In my view the lack of flash, a USB port and a memory card slot continue to be huge deficits. Until this past week my reservations about the iPad have been mostly theoretical,… Read More
TSMC 2011 Technology Symposium Theme Explained
The 17[SUP]th[/SUP] Annual TSMC Technology Symposium will be held in San Jose California on April 5[SUP]th[/SUP], 2011. Dr. Morris Chang will again be the keynote speaker. The theme this year is “Trusted Technology and Capacity Provider”and I think it’s important to not only hear what people are saying but also understand why… Read More
Essential signal data and Siloti
One of the challenges with verifying today’s large chips is deciding which signals to record during simulation so that you can work out the root cause when you detect something anomalous in the results. If you record too few signals, then you risk having to re-run the entire simulation when you omitted to record a signal that… Read More
Mentor Graphics 1 : Carl Icahn 0!
This is just another blog about Carl Icahn and his quest to conquer EDA, when in fact EDA is conquering him. It includes highlights from my dinner with Mentor Graphics and Physicist Brian Greene, the Mentor Q4 conference call, and meeting Mentor CEO Wally Rhines at DvCon 2011.
It wasn’t just the free food this time, dinner with Brian… Read More
Clock Domain Crossing, a potted history
Yesterday I talked to Shaker Sarwary, the senior product director for Atrenta’s clock-domain crossing (CDC) product SpyGlass-CDC. I asked him how it came about. The product was originally started nearly 8 years ago, around the time Atrenta itself got going. Shaker got involved about 5 years ago.
Originally this was a small… Read More
All you want to know about MIPI IP… don’t be shy, just ask IPnest
According with the MIPI Alliance, the year 2009 has been the time for MIPI specification to be developed, when 2010 was dedicated to Marketing and Communication effort to popularize MIPI technologies within the SC industry, finally the year 2011 is expected to see MIPI deployment in the mass market, at least in the Wireless (Handset)… Read More
Semiconductor Power Crisis and TSMC!
Power grids all over the world are already overloaded even without the slew of new electronic gadgets and cars coming out this year. At ISSCC, Dr. Jack Sun, TSMC Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer made the comparison of a human brain to the closest thing available in silicon, a graphical processing unit (GPU).… Read More
With EUVL, Expect No Holiday
For a brief time in the 1990s, when 4X magnification steppers suddenly made mask features 4X larger, there was a period in the industry referred to as the “mask vendor’s holiday.” The party ended before it got started with the arrival of sub-wavelength lithography, and we all trudged back to the OPC/RET mines. Since then, the demands… Read More
Semiconductor Design Flows: Paranoia or Prudence
I was recently talking to a friend who works for a semiconductor company (I can’t tell you which one or how big it is. I am not even sure I can tell you that he/she works for a semiconductor company.) I was describing Semiwiki.com to him/her and this person thought it was a great concept but wondered how much of the site would be focused … Read More
Will Thunderbolt kill SuperSpeed USB?
And probably more protocols, like: Firewire, eSATA, HDMI …
Some of you probably know it as Light Peak, as it was the code name for the just announced (last week) Thunderbolt Intel proprietary interface, supporting copper (or optical) interconnect when Light Peak was optical only. This will make Thunderbolt easier to implement,… Read More
AI Semiconductor Market