I am convinced after studying out the matter, that Aldec is one of the leaders in DO254 certification. As you listen and read the news as I do about flight MA-370, you keep theorizing and wondering. This is a good time to introduce the reader to the seriousness of flight worthy electronics and the arduous process to achieve certification.… Read More
As I have mentioned before, I’m part of the Coleman Research Group so you can rent me by the hour to better understand the semiconductor industry. Most of the conversations are by phone but sometimes I do travel to the East Coast, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China for face-to-face meetings. Generally the calls are the result of an event … Read More
Did you know in the Xilinx Virtex 28nm series you can REALLY run the DSP at 741 MHz? I say ‘really’ as you know dear reader, not all the FPGA claims of speed and usage tends to live up to reality. I cannot stand marketing games where you can run at a GHz ‘But’ and then comes the list of gotcha’s. Don’t believe me? Whaaat? Well let’s take a journey… Read More
I have never done this before, wished a company happy birthday. So here goes, Happy Birthday Xilinx! How does it feel to be 30? Looking good eh? Signing up for AARP? My family and I just sang and had cake and ice cream. They did look at me like I was nuts when I set a place at the table for a Xilinx FPGA. In all seriousness, over the years Xilinx… Read More
There is a rumor making the rounds that Altera will leave Intel and return to TSMC. Rumors are just rumors but this one certainly has legs and I will tell you why and what I would have done if I were Altera CEO John Daane. Altera is a great company, one that I have enjoyed working with over the years, but I really think they made a serious mistake… Read More
There has always been a dream that you could do a design in a cheap easy to design technology and then, if the design was a hit, press a button and instantly move it into a cheaper unit-price high volume design. When I was at VLSI in the 1980s we had approaches to make it easy to move gate arrays (relatively large die area) into standard cells… Read More
This has been a heated topic since Intel announced that it would open its manufacturing facilities to the fabless ecosystem more than a year ago. I for one think it is a colossal mistake and I’m not surprised that many others share this view. IDM’s offering of excess manufacturing capacity to semiconductor design companies… Read More
Altera announced in February that they would be using Intel as a foundry at 14nm. Historically they have used TSMC. Then in June they announced the Stratix 10 family of FPGAs that they would build on the Intel process. At the Globalpress summit in May I asked Vince Hu about their processor strategy. Here is what I wrote about itat the… Read More
The 5[SUP]th[/SUP] annual TSMC OIP Forum was last week and thankfully there were no surprises with the exception of how many people asked me who I think will be the next TSMC CEO. Certainly I have no idea but I would be happy to use my incredible powers of deductive reasoning to determine who it will be.
The TSMC Open Innovation Platform®… Read More
I have many thoughts on this topic, so forgive the word salad that may ensue. I have been thinking about Coca-Cola lately, partly because I bought an old coke machine (I’m one of those guys… pray for my wife). I am amazed that Coke which was founded in 1886, still has a secret recipe. I like that, but boy every time the web reveals the coke… Read More
