Machine learning (ML) is already making its way into EDA tools and flows, but the majority of announcements have been around implementation, especially in guiding toward improved timing and area. This is a pretty obvious place to start; ML is in one sense an optimization technique, trained on prior examples, which should be able… Read More
China buys more than half of the semiconductors manufactured in the world and yet only produces less the 10% of their own demand. Recently there have been a lot of announcements out of China about large scale investments in semiconductor manufacturing. The Chinese government for example has announced plans to invest $161 billion… Read More
The 2016 edition of the Flash Memory Summit produced more than the usual amount of excitement. Samsung’s response to the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint challenge arrived in new slideware, indicating the war for next-generation SSDs is just starting. Who has the advantage?
We’d all like to think this is about creating a breakthrough technology,… Read More
Semiconductor market forecasts for 2016 are all over the place. Jim Handy and Tom Starnes floated a report in January looking for 10% growth. Jim Feldhan at Semico turned outright negative at -0.3% just a couple weeks ago. Tossing out the high and low scores, analysts tracked by GSA range from 0.3% to 7.0% in March updates. What’s … Read More
Global semiconductor production capacity and its utilization level are key elements of the technology economy. During a panel at DAC in June Mentor Graphics posited that we are entering into a period where leading edge processes will be in high demand and also older nodes are seeing increasing demand due to Internet of Things designs… Read More
One of the challenges with today’s SoCs is that chip-finishing, putting the final touches to the SoC working at the chip level, stresses layout editors to the limit. Either they run out of capacity to load the entire chip, or they can handle the entire chip but everything is like wading through molasses, it takes an awfully … Read More
