In a keynote at the 62nd Design Automation Conference (DAC) on July 8, 2025, William Chappell, Vice President of Mission Systems at Microsoft, reflected on the intertwined evolution of AI and semiconductor design. Drawing from his DARPA experience, Chappell traced AI’s progression from 2016 onward, highlighting its… Read More
At a recent conference session on July 9, 2025, Prashant Varshney, head of the Silicon and Physics Industry Vertical for Microsoft’s Discovery and Quantum Division, unveiled the transformative potential of the Microsoft Discovery Platform. This innovative platform, announced at Microsoft’s Build event, aims to redefine… Read More
As IC designs become increasingly complex, traditional Design Rule Checking (DRC) methods are struggling to keep up. The old “construct by correction” approach, initially developed for simpler, custom layouts, is creating substantial runtime and resource bottlenecks. Traditional DRC relies on an iterative, sequential… Read More
Entering the exhibit area of DAC on the first floor I was immediately faced with the Keysight EDA booth, and it was even larger than either the Synopsys or Cadence booths. They had a complete schedule of partners presenting in their theatre that included: Microsoft Azure, Riscure, Fermi Labs, BAE Systems, Alphawave, Intel Foundry,… Read More
At the recent User2user conference, Amit Kumar, Principal Hardware Engineer, Microsoft, shared the company’s experience from building a 3DIC SoC and highlighted Siemens EDA tools that were used. The following is a synthesis of core aspects of that talk.
Despite the numerous advantages of 3DIC technology, its… Read More
I wrote last year about the challenge Arm Client/Mobile faces in growing in a saturated phone market and how they put a big focus on mobile gaming to stimulate growth. The gaming direction continues but this year they have added (of course) an AI focus, not just to mobile but also to other clients, notably PCs. It would be easy to be cynical… Read More
We have all heard of many advanced technological inventions and products from the defense sector that subsequently got commercialized. While most of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) projects are classified secrets, many military innovations have had great influence in the commercial sector in the fields… Read More
You probably know the value proposition for using AI and ML (machine learning) in simulation regressions. There are lots of knobs you can tweak on a simulator, all there to help you squeeze more seconds, or minutes out of a run. If you know how to use those options. But often it’s easier to talk to your friendly AE, get a reasonable default… Read More
The annual Siemens Digital Industries Software user group event was held virtually on May 26th, which made it easy to attend from my home office, although selecting from the list of speakers was a challenge, because they offered 475 sessions, wow. My focus is EDA, so I listened to Joseph Sawicki, the Executive Vice President, IC … Read More
Tesla Motors did it again. In September of 2019 Tesla launched its “Software Version 10.0,” a software update targeted primarily at in-vehicle infotainment systems. Principal among the extensive menu of updates was something called “Tesla Theater” which added streaming video content sources including Netflix, Hulu, Youtube,… Read More
