Designing an ASIC is little bit like trying to hit the bullseye, in the dark. I’ve spent several decades in the ASIC business I can tell you this is what it’s like from first-hand experience. When the design team sets out to build a custom chip to make their product better, faster, more robust, etc. (pick the words you like), there is … Read More
The concept of platform-based design has been around a long time. I can recall Nokia’s early cell phone products used the strategy very effectively. They were able to turn out new phones quickly by leveraging their existing chip design as a baseline on which to add features. This is commonplace today but was innovative at that time.… Read More
I first remember blogging about EDA in the cloud starting back in 2011, so what’s changed in the last 10 years you may ask? In 2011, it was basically a handful of EDA point tools running batch mode in the cloud, and you were on your own to integrate those into a coherent flow, so expect help from the CAD and IT departments for sure.… Read More
The above title refers to a webinar that was hosted by Altair on April 28th. Chip design in the cloud is not a new idea. So, what is the big deal with the above title. Sometimes titles don’t reveal the full story. Annapurna Labs happens to be an Amazon company. It used to be an independent semiconductor company that was acquired by Amazon… Read More
The 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) market has seen great innovation in the products it offers to System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers over the last ten years. If any market segment in the semiconductor industry typifies the intense evolutionary pressures that the entire electronics market has undergone, … Read More
Design IP Sales Grew 16.7% in 2020, to reach $4.6B and this is the best growth since year 2000!
The main trends shaking the Design IP in 2020 are very positive for the Top 3 IP vendors, each of them growing more than the market and confirm the importance of the wired interface IP market, aligned with the data-centric application, hyperscalar,… Read More
As the months of 2020 passed by, I started noticing more and more people sporting what looked like fashionable ear accessories. I’m of course referring to True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds. With the rapid increase in online meetings due to social distancing requirements, it appeared that adoption of TWS earbuds was even faster… Read More
Dan and Mike are joined by industry luminary Jim Hogan. In a rare interview, Jim talks about his life – how he got into semiconductors, EDA and venture investing. Jim’s time at Cadence as well as his work at ARM are explored. Jim also provides a concise and informative overview of how venture investing works. The podcast… Read More
Compute Express Link (CXL), a new open interconnect standard, targets intensive workloads for CPUs and purpose-built accelerators where efficient, coherent memory access between a host and device is required. A consortium to enable this new standard is in place, and a lot of heavy hitters are behind the standard, including … Read More
Before founding SemiWiki I competed with Arm on many different levels throughout my career and I have had various business dealings with them since. SemiWiki also published the definitive book on Arm: “Mobile Unleashed” which goes deep into the history of Arm and the top SoC companies (Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung).… Read More
