Being Intelligent about AI ASICs

Being Intelligent about AI ASICs
by Tom Simon on 06-06-2018 at 12:00 pm

The progression from CPU to GPU, FPGA and then ASIC affords an increase in throughput and performance, but comes at the price of decreasing flexibility and generality. Like most new areas of endeavor in computing, artificial intelligence (AI) began with implementations based on CPU’s and software. And, as have so many other applications,… Read More


Webinar: Achieve High-performance and High-throughput with Intel based FPGA Prototyping

Webinar: Achieve High-performance and High-throughput with Intel based FPGA Prototyping
by Daniel Nenni on 03-19-2018 at 12:00 pm

FPGAs have been used for ASIC prototyping since the beginning of FPGAs (1980s) allowing hardware and software designers to work in harmony developing, testing, and optimizing their products. We covered the history of FPGAs in Chapter 3 of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”, which includes … Read More


Herb Reiter on the Challenges of 2.5D ASIC SiPs

Herb Reiter on the Challenges of 2.5D ASIC SiPs
by Daniel Nenni on 02-23-2018 at 12:00 pm

Years ago my good friend Herb Reiter promoted the importance of 2.5D packaging to anybody and everybody who would listen including myself. Today Herb’s vision is in production and the topic of many papers, webinars, and conferences. According to Herb, and I agree completely, advanced IC packaging is an important technology for… Read More


What does a Deep Learning Chip Look Like

What does a Deep Learning Chip Look Like
by Daniel Nenni on 02-16-2018 at 12:00 pm

There’s been a lot of discussion of late about deep learning technology and its impact on many markets and products. A lot of the technology under discussion is basically hardware implementations of neural networks, a concept that’s been around for a while.

What’s new is the compute power that advanced semiconductor technology… Read More


High Performance Ecosystem for 14nm-FinFET ASICs with 2.5D Integrated HBM2 Memory

High Performance Ecosystem for 14nm-FinFET ASICs with 2.5D Integrated HBM2 Memory
by Mitch Heins on 02-07-2018 at 10:00 am


High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) systems have been successfully used for some time now in the network switching and high-performance computing (HPC) spaces. Now, adding fuel to the HBM fire, there is another market that shares similar system requirements as HPC and that is Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially AI systems doing… Read More


Webinar: The Emergence of FPGA Prototyping for ASIC and SoC Design

Webinar: The Emergence of FPGA Prototyping for ASIC and SoC Design
by Daniel Nenni on 01-26-2018 at 12:00 pm

One of the more interesting markets that I cover is FPGA Prototyping. Interesting because it is fast growing ($150-250M) and interesting because it is all about design starts and design starts are the lifeblood of the semiconductor industry.

If you are interested in FPGA prototyping you might want to start with the 30+ S2C Inc blogsRead More


FinFET ASICs for Networking, Data Center, AI and 5G

FinFET ASICs for Networking, Data Center, AI and 5G
by Daniel Nenni on 01-08-2018 at 12:00 pm

On the heels of successful seminars in Tokyo and Shanghai, eSilicon is starting the new year back in the cloud with a webinar version of the live events for those, like myself, who could not attend. The webinar will compress the 3 hour live event into 60 minutes which will provide a great place to start a conversation on your next chip… Read More


ASIC and TSMC are the AI Chip Unsung Heroes

ASIC and TSMC are the AI Chip Unsung Heroes
by Daniel Nenni on 11-20-2017 at 7:00 am

One of the more exciting design start market segments that we track is Artificial Intelligence related ASICs. With NVIDIA making billions upon billions of dollars repurposing GPUs as AI engines in the cloud, the Application Specific Integrated Circuit business was sure to follow. Google now has its Tensor Processing Unit, Intel… Read More


New e-Book – Custom SoCs for IoT: Simplified – Available for Free Download

New e-Book – Custom SoCs for IoT: Simplified – Available for Free Download
by Mitch Heins on 11-17-2017 at 12:00 pm

We are fortunate to be living in one of the most amazing and exciting times in the history of our planet. The developments seen in my life time alone have been astounding and we are now on the cusp of yet another inflection point. The world wide web has morphed into the internet of things (IoT), some even call it the internet-of-everything… Read More


Scale the tools not your expectations

Scale the tools not your expectations
by Frederic Leens on 11-16-2017 at 12:00 pm

The complexity of silicon chips is exploding. Actually, it has been growing at a tremendous speed for decades. So far, the semiconductor industry has been successful at providing new ways to master new levels of complexity, over and over again.

Standardizing hardware platforms, using higher-level languages with a knowledge… Read More