Big Data, the Cloud and the Internet of (Silicon) Things

Big Data, the Cloud and the Internet of (Silicon) Things
by Paul McLellan on 08-31-2014 at 7:01 am

Next week, eSilicon are kicking off a very widespread survey to measure some important semiconductor design and manufacturing challenges. Their goal is to measure customer sentiment regarding how Big Data, the Cloud and the Internet can impact these challenges. But here’s a secret, the survey is already live and you can… Read More


National Semiconductor Education in the Cloud

National Semiconductor Education in the Cloud
by Paul McLellan on 06-16-2014 at 1:28 am

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” wrote Wordsworth. Well, clouds are pretty lonely in EDA these days. Despite some of the advantages on paper that mean that companies from salesforce.com to Netflix make heavy use of cloud-computing, semiconductor design has barely touched the cloud. One exception was Nimbic (acquired… Read More


Cloud-RAN: a New Way to Build a Basestation

Cloud-RAN: a New Way to Build a Basestation
by Paul McLellan on 10-21-2013 at 11:01 pm

One thing that I learned about at the Liney Microprocessor Conference last week was C-RAN which stands for Cloud Radio Access Networks. The technology is created by ASOCS who are working with China Mobile as the driving customer. And before you dismiss that as just being one network interested in the technology, China Mobile has… Read More


The Middle is A Bad Place to Be if You’re a CPU Board

The Middle is A Bad Place to Be if You’re a CPU Board
by Don Dingee on 10-09-2012 at 10:45 pm

In a discussion with one of my PR network recently, I found myself thinking out loud that if the merchant SoC market is getting squeezed hard, that validates something I’ve been thinking – the merchant CPU board market is dying from the middle out.… Read More


Chip in the Clouds – “Precipitation”

Chip in the Clouds – “Precipitation”
by Kalar Rajendiran on 05-27-2012 at 3:34 am

Since around the posting of my prior blog [Chip in the Clouds – “Gathering”] to now many events have taken place. Facebook announced its intent to acquire Instagram for $1B in cash and stock, completed its initial public offering, announced an Instagram competitive product by releasing “Facebook Camera” … Read More


Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out?

Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out?
by Paul McLellan on 04-26-2012 at 9:00 pm

Do you need more servers? Do you need more licenses? If you are kicking off a verification run of 10,000 jobs on 1,000 server cores then you are short of 9000 cores and 9000 licenses, but you’d be insane to rush out with a purchase order just on that basis. Maybe verification isn’t even on the critical path for your design,… Read More


Chip in the Clouds – "Gathering"

Chip in the Clouds – "Gathering"
by Kalar Rajendiran on 04-13-2012 at 1:29 pm


Cloud computing is the talk of the tech world nowadays. I even hear commentaries about how entrepreneurs are turned down by venture capitalists for not including a cloud component into their business plan no matter what the core business may be. The commentary goes “It’s cloudy without any clouds.” Add some clouds to your strategy… Read More


Farm Management

Farm Management
by Paul McLellan on 03-01-2012 at 5:34 pm

Every so often I come across a new company in EDA or one of its neighboring domains, new to me anyway, and new to SemiWiki. One such company is RunTime Design Automation (RTDA). They provide a suite of tools for managing server farms (or internal clouds which seems to be the trendy buzzword du jour). Running a few EDA scripts on a few servers… Read More


Simulating in the Cloud

Simulating in the Cloud
by Paul McLellan on 09-13-2011 at 1:43 pm

Yesterday I met with David Hsu who is the marketing guy for Synopsys’s cloud computing solution that they announced at their user-group meeting earlier this year. It was fun to catch up; David used to work for me back in VLSI days although he was an engineer writing place and route software back then.

David admits that this is… Read More