Six Reasons to Visit Cadence at #53DAC this Year in Austin

Six Reasons to Visit Cadence at #53DAC this Year in Austin
by Daniel Payne on 05-29-2016 at 4:00 pm

For bloggers like myself spending four days at #53DAC is almost a non-stop blur of activity, visiting EDA vendors, IP providers and foundries to learn about what’s happening in our semiconductor industry. Cadence is both an EDA vendor and IP provider, so DAC is a great showcase for them to tell us what’s new in 2016 and… Read More


Body-biasing for ARM big or LITTLE in GF 22FDX

Body-biasing for ARM big or LITTLE in GF 22FDX
by Don Dingee on 05-04-2016 at 4:00 pm

GLOBALFOUNDRIES has been evangelizing their 22FDX FD-SOI process for a few months; readers may have seen Tom Simon’s write-up of their preview at ARM TechCon. Dr. Joerg Winkler recently gave an updated webinar presentation of their approach in an implementation of ARM Cortex-A17 core.

By now, you’ve probably heard that 22FDX… Read More


Eight Improvements for PCB Software

Eight Improvements for PCB Software
by Daniel Payne on 05-04-2016 at 12:00 pm

I first met John Durbetaki at Intel in Aloha, Oregon and we both had a keen interest in the nascent personal computer industry. My first PC was made by Radio Shack and dubbed the TRS-80 which maxed out at 48KB of RAM. I kept watch on Durbetaki as he left Intel and formed his own company OrCAD in 1985 to serve the needs of PC-based CAD software.… Read More


Cadence loads up on MACs for vision with CNNs

Cadence loads up on MACs for vision with CNNs
by Don Dingee on 05-02-2016 at 4:00 pm

For vision DSP IP running convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a big driver of performance is increasing the bits processed per cycle with parallel MACs. Tom Simon did a great job in recent posts of introducing CNNs at a high level, so I’ll look at what is architecturally behind Cadence’s latest announcement: the Tensilica Vision… Read More


Neural Networks Poised to Make Big Changes in Our World

Neural Networks Poised to Make Big Changes in Our World
by Tom Simon on 04-11-2016 at 12:00 pm

Probably the most interesting thing about Neural Networks is how they can be used for complex recognition tasks that we as people can easily perform but we might have a lot of trouble explaining how. One very good example of a problem that Neural Networks can tackle is determining when people are making a fake smile. Intuitively we… Read More


Mobile Unleashed…Reviewed

Mobile Unleashed…Reviewed
by Paul McLellan on 04-07-2016 at 10:00 am

I finished reading Don Dingee and Dan Nenni’s book, Mobile Unleashed, the Origin and Evolution of ARM Processors in Our Devices. I guess by way of disclosure I should say that Don and Dan both blogged with me here on SemiWiki for several years before I joined Cadence, and Dan’s last book Fabless was co-authored with me… Read More


The Most Important Point You May Have Missed at CDNLive 2016!

The Most Important Point You May Have Missed at CDNLive 2016!
by Daniel Nenni on 04-06-2016 at 4:00 am

This was the best keynote lineup I can remember at a user group meeting. All four speakers are visionaries but from very different perspectives. The video of the event will be up later this month but from my first count the word “System(s)” was mentioned 32 times and the underlying message will transform the semiconductor industry… Read More


Cadence is again the best EDA company to work for!

Cadence is again the best EDA company to work for!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-10-2016 at 7:00 am

We wrote about the history of Cadence in preparation for our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” in 2012. EDA played a key role in enabling the fabless semiconductor revolution and Cadence was right there at the beginning. Famed EETimes editor Richard Goering helped us with the book and the Cadence… Read More


Neural Networks Ready for Embedded Platforms

Neural Networks Ready for Embedded Platforms
by Tom Simon on 02-24-2016 at 7:00 am

If you are not yet familiar with the term Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNN for short, you are certainly bound to become in the year ahead. Using Artificial Intelligence in the form of CNN is on the verge of replacing a large number of computing tasks, especially those involving recognizing things such as sounds, shapes, objects,… Read More


Cadence Adds New Dimension to SoC Test Solution

Cadence Adds New Dimension to SoC Test Solution
by Pawan Fangaria on 02-04-2016 at 7:00 am

It requires lateral thinking in bringing new innovation into conventional solutions to age-old hard problems. While the core logic design has evolved adding multiple functionalities onto a chip, now called SoC, the structural composition of DFT (Design for Testability) has remained more or less same based on XOR-based compression… Read More