There hasn’t been this much excitement in Munich since the 1920’s. Nvidia’s great pivot was on display at the GPU Technology Conference Munich 2017. Digital dashboards are out and robotaxis are in as Nvidia narrows its focus on the tip of the automotive industry disruption spear.
To be clear, Nvidia is triangulating on the automotive… Read More
It really is an exciting time in semiconductors. The benchmarks on the new Apple A11 SoC and the Nvidia GPU are simply amazing. Even though Moore’s Law is slowing, the resulting chips are improving well above and beyond expectations, absolutely.
As I have mentioned before, non-traditional chip companies such as Apple, Amazon,… Read More
Traditionally, EDA has been a brute force methodology where we buy more software licenses and more CPUs and keep running endless jobs to keep up with the increasing design and process complexities. SPICE simulation for example; when I meet chip designers (which I do quite frequently) I ask them how many simulations they do for a … Read More
The defining characteristic of In-Circuit-Emulation (ICE) has been that the emulator is connected to real circuitry – a storage device perhaps, and PCIe or Ethernet interfaces. The advantage is that you can test your emulated model against real traffic and responses, rather than an interface model which may not fully capture… Read More
I recall back in the late 1980’s when logic synthesis tools were first commercialized, at first they could read in a gate-level netlist from one foundry then output an optimized netlist back into the same foundry. Next, they could migrate your gate-level netlist from Vendor A over to Vendor B, giving design companies some… Read More
At DAC this year you could learn a lot about hardware design for AI or Machine Learning (ML) applications. We are all familiar with the massively parallel hardware being developed for autonomous vehicles, cloud computing, search engines and the like. This includes, for instance, hardware from Nvidia and others that enable ML … Read More
When speaking before the U.S. Senate or Congress one has to choose one’s words carefully. The temptation, when one is speaking before legislators and microphones and cameras, is to tell it like it is and speak truth to power. The reality is that the power of the legislators and the microphones and the cameras must be respected and,… Read More
DAC is upon us again! The Design Automation Conference holds special meaning to me as it was the first technical conference I attended as a semiconductor professional, or professional anything for that matter. That was 33 years ago and I have not missed one since. This year my wife and I both will be walking the DAC floor and it would… Read More
Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, gave the opening keynote at CES this year. That’s hardly surprising. From a company that operated on the fringes of mainstream awareness (those guys that do gamer graphics), they finished 2016 as the top-performing company in the S&P 500, returning revenue growth of 35% (forecast). That’s startup… Read More
In a recent SemiWiki article it was noted that 5 of the top 20 semiconductor suppliers are showing double-digit gains for 2016. At the top of the list was NVIDIA with an annual growth rate of 35%. Most of this gain is due to sales of its graphics processors (GPUs) which one normally associates with high performance computer gaming engines.… Read More
