Wireless technology is all around as I use cellular on an Android phone, WiFi to connect my MacBook Pro to the internet, Bluetooth for a headset, ANT+ for my cycling computer, and NFC to speed up electronic payments on the Android phone. Here’s a big picture look at some of the modern wireless standards available to choose from:… Read More
Today, Smartphones and mobile devices have become center of innovation with multiple functions getting into them. Considering the audio or voice application, there can be multi-way conferencing, video chat, complete audio/video streaming, gaming, voice triggering and recognition,… you name an application, and it will … Read More
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
It is the 50th year of IEDM, the International Electron Devices Meeting. The fact that it has been going for so long reveals why it has such an odd name: back in 1964 most “electron devices” were tubes (valves in UK lingo). This year they gave all of us a USB stick with all the papers from all 50 years of the event, something… Read More
In today’s world where every device functions intelligently, it automatically becomes active on any kind of stimulus. The problem with such intelligence is that it can function unfavorably on any kind of bad stimulus. As the devices are complex enough in the form of SoCs (which at advanced process nodes are more susceptible to … Read More
We’ve blogged dozens of times about UVM– Universal Verification Methodology at SemiWiki, and all of the major EDA vendors support UVM, so you may be lulled into thinking that UVM is totally adequate for top-down SoC verification. Yesterday I had a phone discussion with Frank Schirrmeister of Cadence about a new approach… Read More
Last Thursday night was the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] annual GSA Awards Dinner which probably hosts one of the largest collections of semiconductor executives. Think of a movie or music awards show with all of the trimmings including Jay Leno as the keynote. I don’t know the exact head count but there were 160 dinner tables with 10 plates … Read More
The simple answer is when everything in the world is smart. But if you think deeply, you would find that the continuous progression to make things easy in life is what makes the world smarter day-by-day – the sky is the limit. In the world of computing, consider the 17[SUP]th[/SUP] century era when humanbrain was used as a computer … Read More
One of the biggest challenges in the IP business, or any other business for that matter, is managing the information flow. Semiconductor IP is a critical piece of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem so anybody and everybody can write about it. Unfortunately, anybody and everybody ARE writing about it. From day one IP has been a … Read More
TowerJazzis a specialty foundry that provides IC manufacturing into several markets, like: RF, high-performance analog, power, imaging, consumer, automotive, medical, industrial and aerospace/defense. In June there was a presentation from Ofer Tamir of TowerJazz at DACin the Cadence theatre, so I had a chance this week … Read More
