DesignCon is a unique conference — its tagline is “Where the Chip meets the Board”. Held each January in Santa Clara, the conference showcases a wealth of new technologies for advanced packaging, printed circuit board fabrication, connectors, cables, and related analysis equipment (e.g, BERT, VNA, scopes). Of specific… Read More
For any invention, technical proof of concept or prototyping happens years ahead of the invention being infused into actual products. When we talk about 5nm chip manufacturing, a test chip was already prototyped in last October, thanks to Cadence and Imec. Details about this chip can be found in a blog at Semiwiki (link is given … Read More
A funny thing happened while I was reading “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine”. The book explains the subprime mortgage crisis in painful detail by profiling several key players who predicted and profited from the bubble pop. As a home owner and faux slumlord I had a front row seat to this horror show so it was an interesting… Read More
A unique phenomenon has started manifesting itself under the slew of mergers and acquisitions this year in the semiconductor landscape. This phenomenon is bound to intensify in the near future and would positions itself as a key factor for the future of the semiconductor industry. The winners and losers in the game would be determined… Read More
The 50 year anniversary of the publication of Moore’s Law was recently celebrated, highlighting the tremendous advances in the Microelectronics Eraof the period in human history known as the Information Age. However, the technical and economic challenges currently faced by the microelectronics industry are bringing into… Read More
It is an indictment of our irrationality that our cars are now more health-conscious than we are. Increasingly safety-conscious readings of the ISO26262 standard now encourage that safety-critical electronics (anti-lock braking control for example) automatically self-test, not just at power-on but repeatedly as the car… Read More
I had a debate with Steve Carlson of Cadence earlier in the year at the EDPS conference on whether there were really any truly effective solutions for doing power estimation in emulation. I thought there weren’t and he said I was wrong. After attending the Cadence front-end summit last week, I have to admit he has a point.
First, who… Read More
At the Cadence front-end summit last week, Jay Roy presented the Cadence Joules solution for RTL (and gate-level) power estimation. Jay is ex-Apache, so knows his way around RTL power estimation which should make Joules a product to watch. Joules connects very natively to Palladium for power characterization for realistic software… Read More
I was at the Cadence front-end summit this week; good conference with lots of interesting information. I’ll start with a panel on optimizing power for wearables. Panelists were Anthony Hill from TI, Fred Jen from Qualcomm, Leah Clark from Broadcom and Jay Roy from Cadence. Panels are generally most entertaining when the panelists… Read More
I really enjoy ARM Techcon when it rolls around every year because it has such a wide range of topics and exhibits. You can find maker gadgets, IoT information, small boards for industrial control, software development kits, semiconductor IP vendors as well as the big EDA players and foundries. This year after perusing the exhibit… Read More
