From AMD to Actel (to Microchip)

From AMD to Actel (to Microchip)
by John East on 09-02-2019 at 6:00 am

By the late 80s it had become clear to me that the Japanese were right.  Memories,  Microprocessors,  and Gate Arrays (As well as ASICs) were what customers wanted then.  “Building blocks of ever-increasing complexity” was obsolete.  What next?  Should I try to become an overnight networking expert?  Maybe a DSP expert?  Pretty… Read More


Lynn Conway’s Story

Lynn Conway’s Story
by Paul McLellan on 07-28-2013 at 12:08 am

If you are my age, you know that the most influential book in that era on VLSI design was Carver Mead and Lynn Conway’s textbook, blah VLSI blah. Nobody can remember exactly what its title was, it was just referred to as Mead and Conway. In my opinion it was the most influential book on semiconductor design ever. It opened up VLSI… Read More


A Brief History of Tanner EDA

A Brief History of Tanner EDA
by Daniel Nenni on 01-28-2013 at 11:00 pm

While founder John Tanner, PhD, got his initial exposure to the TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook as an undergraduate, it was his experience as a Caltech graduate student that forged his early path in EDA. In 1979, while enrolled in a VLSI design course at Caltech, John and his classmates received a pre-print of Carver Mead’s seminal… Read More


A Brief History of Moore’s Law

A Brief History of Moore’s Law
by Sam Beal on 10-11-2012 at 9:00 pm


I recently read a news article where the author referred to Moore’s Law as a ‘Law of Science discovered by an Intel engineer’. Readers of SemiWiki would call that Dilbertesque. Gordon Moore was Director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1965 when he published his now-famous paper on integrated electronic
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