In my last corporate EDA job I had customers in Korea that were evaluating a new circuit simulator and getting strange results. When I asked, “Could you send me your test case?” the reply was always, “No, we cannot let any of our IC design data leave the building because of security concerns.”… Read More



Is Indian Semiconductor Relevant?
A common discussion amongst semiconductor professionals is the ROI of development activity in India. An interesting number I remember hearing at Virage Logic was that the development groups in India had a 30%+ turnover rate. Is that still the case? If so, that is very hard on the ROI.
Here are the 2012 SemiWiki geographical statistics… Read More
Altera’s New Dual ARM® Cortex™-A9 SoC Arria® and Cyclone® V FPGA Families
Altera recently introduced versions of their new Arria® and Cyclone® V FPGA families that incorporates a dual ARM®Cortex™-A9 MPCore hard core. These parts are particularly interesting to NARD as it’s consistent with the NARD concept of offering platforms unified by a common ARM® host core and a variety of controller/coprocessor… Read More
Semiconductor IP Dilemma?
Just how many hands have touched your SoC design by the time it goes to manufacturing? Clearly the more hands that touch it, the more complex the design is, making it more difficult to meet your product requirements. The commercial semiconductor IP dilemma is that not only are you using the same IP as your competitors, you are exponentially… Read More
Micron Races to Its Future
Perhaps no semiconductor company took it on the chin harder the last half of 2011 than Micron. And yet, perhaps no company was racing as hard as Micron to make a radical changeover. Micron is considered a bell weather on the overall health of the semiconductor industry given that DRAM, NAND and NOR Flash are used in some combination… Read More
America Heads Into a Generational Turn
America has received a gift whose consequence and magnitude is just now unfolding before our eyes. Taken to its limits, it may in the course of the next decade finally free us from many of our foreign entanglements while lifting the economic burdens from the working majority that has seen their wages stagnate for the past 40 years.… Read More
Happy Holidays From SemiWiki
It has been an amazing year for us so we wanted to thank you all for being a part of the Semiconductor Wiki Project!
The SemiWiki Bloggers are off this week and will return the first week of January. During this time there will be a major SemiWiki software update. There will be performance upgrades and lots of new features to enhance the… Read More
View from the top: Joe Sawicki
Joe Sawicki is the VP and General Manager at Mentor Graphics for the Design-to-Silicon Division where the Calibre product line is developed. We met today in Wilsonville, Oregon to review the challenges in IC design, processing and manufacturing.… Read More
eTale of Christmas: DSK, sex, economy and geopolitics
Former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief, Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has spoken at a conference organized by a Chinese Internet company, NetEase.com Inc. in Beijing last Monday, and he was rather pessimistic about the future of European economy, at least if politician keep focus on Continent’s dept problem and not enough… Read More
T’is the season for…semiconductor forecasts
T’is the season to be jolly…and to predict the next year’s semiconductor market.
KPMG does a regular survey of senior executives in semiconductor companies to get their outlook on the year ahead. The message this year is mixed. 41% of executives expected their business to grow by more than 5% next year, which sounds not too bad until… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki