How to Engage with the Fabless Semiconductor Ecosystem

How to Engage with the Fabless Semiconductor Ecosystem
by Daniel Nenni on 07-16-2013 at 10:00 pm

SemiWiki is absolutely the best place to start of course. You can read observations, opinions, and experiences on a wide variety of semiconductor related topics from semiconductor professionals around the world. You can also mingle with the 653,105+ people who visit SemiWiki in the comment sections and the forum. Registration… Read More


VIA Adopts Cliosoft

VIA Adopts Cliosoft
by Paul McLellan on 07-16-2013 at 4:27 pm

VIA Telecom, who makes CDMA base-band processor chips, picked ClioSoft SOS for use by its analog mixed-signal design teams. Like many such teams they use Cadence’s Virtuoso layout platform. ClioSoft’s SOS is seamlessly integrated into Virtuoso so that designers don’t really need to spend much time worrying… Read More


Interview with Arasan

Interview with Arasan
by Daniel Nenni on 07-12-2013 at 7:00 pm


Recently I had a chance to chat with Arasan Ganesan, CEO at Arasan Chip Systems in San Jose, CA. Arasan Chip Systems has provided Silicon interface IP and supporting hardware and software to the semiconductor industry for more than 15 years. The headquarters are in San Jose and engineering offices in Bangalore and Tuticorin, India.… Read More


Data Centers accounts for 2 to 3% of WW Energy Consumption!

Data Centers accounts for 2 to 3% of WW Energy Consumption!
by Eric Esteve on 07-11-2013 at 8:19 am

Do you think this figure will go down? Considering the massive move to Mobile equipment, pushing to de-localize your storage medium to instead use the cloud capabilities, and looking at the huge number of people buying smartphone and tablet in emerging countries, no doubt that Data Center related energy consumption is expected… Read More


Analysis of HLS Results Made Easier

Analysis of HLS Results Made Easier
by Randy Smith on 07-10-2013 at 4:30 pm

In a recent article I discussed how easy it was to debug SystemC source code as shown in a video published on YouTube by Forte Design Systems. I also commented on the usefulness of the well-produced Forte video series. Today, I am reviewing another video in that series on analyzing high-level synthesis (HLS) results.

Cynthesizer… Read More


Towards the 0 DPM Test Goal

Towards the 0 DPM Test Goal
by Paul McLellan on 07-10-2013 at 10:43 am

At Semicon yesterday I attended Mentor’s presentation on improving test standards. Joe Sawicki was meant to present but he was unable to get a flight due to the ongoing disruption at SFO after last weekend’s crash. I just flew in myself and it is odd to see the carcase of that 777 just beside the runway we landed on.

The … Read More


Calypto 2013 Report

Calypto 2013 Report
by Paul McLellan on 07-05-2013 at 5:48 am

Each year Calypto runs a survey of end-users. This year’s survey and report has two parts, power reduction and high level synthesis (HLS).

The topics covered are:

  • survey methodology and demographics
  • top methods used to reduce power
  • engineering time spent on specfiic RTL tasks to reduce power
  • plans to deploy RTL power reduction
Read More

Should the Design Automation Conference Colocate with SEMICON West?

Should the Design Automation Conference Colocate with SEMICON West?
by Daniel Nenni on 07-03-2013 at 8:10 pm

My friend and fellow blogger Kurt Shuler wrote recently, “DAC Is Dead? Long Live DAC!”, which is worth a click over. In addition to providing a nice attendance graph and the top three reasons why it is NOT all rosy, Kurt suggests colocating DAC with other conferences (DESIGN West) but fails to mention SEMICON West.

SEMICON West is Read More


Easy SystemC Debugging

Easy SystemC Debugging
by Randy Smith on 07-03-2013 at 7:00 pm

Electronic system design has been slowly migrating to higher level languages such as SystemC for more than a decade now. SystemC is an open source C++ library that has emerged as a standard for high-level design and system modeling. Writing code in SystemC has several advantages which I won’t elaborate on in this article, though… Read More


LicenseMonitor Users’ Group Silicon Valley

LicenseMonitor Users’ Group Silicon Valley
by Paul McLellan on 07-03-2013 at 3:03 am

If DAC is the most general event in our industry, then the LicenseMonitor Users’ Group Silicon Valley has to be one of the most focused. It was held back in May but one of the key presentations was Brian Janes of RTDA talking about what is new in the latest version of LicenseMonitor which is 2013.03.

Like a number of people at RTDA,… Read More