eSilicon@Samsung: ASIC Design, IP Enablement, and Cloud Platform

eSilicon@Samsung: ASIC Design, IP Enablement, and Cloud Platform
by Paul McLellan on 06-12-2015 at 7:00 am

Earlier this week at DAC, Javier DeLaCruz of eSilicon presented at the Samsung booth. They presented an introduction to what eSilicon does. However, since what they do has changed over the years it is useful to recap. If you know about eSilicon then you probably think of them as a fabless ASIC company. The old ASIC model back in the … Read More


Why is Intel going inside Altera for Servers?

Why is Intel going inside Altera for Servers?
by Eric Esteve on 06-02-2015 at 12:30 pm

You should be happy to listen that Intel will buy Altera FPGA challenger, if you expect always more power to be consumed in datacenter! In 2013 the power consumption linked with the Servers and Storage IC activity, plus the electricity consumed in the systems cooling these high performance chips has reached 91 BILLION KWh (or the… Read More


Will Dark Silicon Dictate Server Blade Architecture?

Will Dark Silicon Dictate Server Blade Architecture?
by Tom Simon on 05-27-2015 at 7:00 pm

Does the evil sounding phenomenon known as Dark Silicon create a big opportunity for FPGA vendors as was predicted recently by Pacific Crest Securities? John Vinh posits that using multiple cores as a method of scaling throughput is flattening out, and the use of FPGA’s to perform computation can help off-load and thus overcome… Read More


Facts Support New Emergence in Semiconductor Landscape

Facts Support New Emergence in Semiconductor Landscape
by Pawan Fangaria on 01-03-2015 at 9:00 am

As we left an exciting year 2014 which is poised to record 7+ % increase in semiconductor revenue (~ $338 B) compared to 2013 (~ $315 B) and entered into another promising year 2015 for semiconductors, I looked back over the year bygone and collected inferences from some of the major important events which clearly convey how 2015 can… Read More


ASIC Days Are Here Again

ASIC Days Are Here Again
by Paul McLellan on 12-18-2014 at 7:00 am

Technology often goes in cycles. Thirty years ago the dominant mode of computing was a shared computing resource with comparatively dumb terminals. Think of a Vax accessed by terminals. Then workstations and the PC came along and the dominant mode became a computer on everyone’s desk. Then the smartphone came along and … Read More


Getting a Quote Without Talking to a Salesman

Getting a Quote Without Talking to a Salesman
by Paul McLellan on 11-09-2014 at 4:00 pm

VLSI Technology, for those of you not of a certain age, was one of the companies that, along with LSI Logic, created the ASIC business. One challenge in ASIC is that the customer needs to decide which ASIC company to use (since the libraries and technologies are all different) meaning they needed to get quotes from several companies.… Read More


Winds of Change in the Custom Chip Market

Winds of Change in the Custom Chip Market
by Peter Gasperini on 07-18-2014 at 4:00 pm

The most interesting part of the semiconductor market for me has always been the Custom Chip sector – the FPGA, ASIC and SoC companies where I have spent my entire career. These three segments provide an excellent barometer of the overall state of financial health and technological innovation for the entire High Tech industry, Read More


Virtual Prototype Update from #51DAC

Virtual Prototype Update from #51DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-30-2014 at 12:07 pm

EDA industry pundit Gary Smithhas been talking about the electronics industry adopting an ESL tool flow for decades, so it was my pleasure to speak with Bill Neifertof Carbon Design Systemsat DAC this month because his company has been offering both tools and models that enable a virtual prototyping design flow.… Read More


Semiconductor Cost Models: Boring But Crucial

Semiconductor Cost Models: Boring But Crucial
by Paul McLellan on 05-01-2014 at 5:00 am

One of the most important and underrated tasks in a semiconductor company is creating the cost model. This is needed in order to be able to price products, and is especially acute in an ASIC or foundry business where there is no sense of a market price because the customer and not the manufacturer owns the intellectual property and … Read More


Quoting Automatically the eSilicon Way

Quoting Automatically the eSilicon Way
by Paul McLellan on 02-13-2014 at 2:31 pm

Every ASIC company has a major challenge: they have to work out what it is going to cost to build the customer’s product and commit to deliver it at that price. Too high and you lose the business. Too low and you will wish you’d lost the business. Historically this has been done largely manually. This is an expensive process.… Read More