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
Tag: asic
Why is Intel going inside Altera for Servers?
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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