GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 2 – Waking the Sleeping Giant

GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 2 – Waking the Sleeping Giant
by Scotten Jones on 11-11-2015 at 8:00 am

In part one of this blog I described a visit to GlobalFoundries (GF) Fab 8 site in Malta New York by Daniel Nenni and myself. In this part 2 of the blog, I will describe the second day of our trip when we visited Fab 9 in Burlington Vermont. Before we got to Burlington I thought it would likely be a letdown after seeing the state-of-the-art… Read More


Verification with Tcl for what? – part 2

Verification with Tcl for what? – part 2
by Anatoly Myshkin on 11-10-2015 at 7:00 am

In Orion Bytes we use Tcl both for the internal research, product and different verification services. We use also SystemVerilog UVM and Python based Cocotb for different approaches. I think it’s no need to deep into the SystemVerilog and UVM principles here – today’s main verification fashion is well described through… Read More


Real Men Use ASIC

Real Men Use ASIC
by Bernard Murphy on 11-09-2015 at 4:00 pm

As we watch the gravitational collapse of the semiconductor industry, it becomes increasingly obvious that the tech zeitgeist, with investment in close lockstep, is squarely centered on complete solutions, not enabling technologies. That this seems unfair (they couldn’t do it without us, and what we do is really, really hard)… Read More


Verification with Tcl for what?

Verification with Tcl for what?
by Anatoly Myshkin on 11-02-2015 at 7:00 am

Nowadays, verification as one of the most complex SoC, FPGA, and ASIC development flow stages always requires new approaches. The following is an introduction to TcL vs/ with SystemVerilog and VHDL, the first in a 3 part series. Part 2 will be “Tcl vs Python, Bluespec” and part 3 will be “VerTcl description”.… Read More


How to Build an IoT Endpoint in Three Months

How to Build an IoT Endpoint in Three Months
by Tom Simon on 09-27-2015 at 7:00 am

It is often said that things go in big cycles. One example of this is the design and manufacturing products. People long ago used to build their own things. Think of villagers or settlers hundreds of years ago, if they needed something they would craft it themselves. Then came the industrial revolution and two things happened. One… Read More


eSilicon Truly Puts the ‘e’ in Silicon

eSilicon Truly Puts the ‘e’ in Silicon
by Paul McLellan on 09-12-2015 at 7:00 am

eSilicon have a new website. Companies update their websites regularly, so why is this news? Well, eSilicon increasingly does their business on the web. They are not like Facebook, say, where their business is entirely web-based, there is a physical business behind them. So they are more like Lyft for chips. Obviously Lyft requires… Read More


Improve SoC Front-end Design Productivity

Improve SoC Front-end Design Productivity
by Khan Kibria on 09-06-2015 at 4:00 pm

I have been involved in SoC developments for a long time. During this period I tried to learn what impacts the productivity and subsequently the market opportunity. Over the last year or so at SoCScape I have been involved designing solutions that can improve them. I have decided to post some of my thoughts here in a series of blogs … Read More


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