Taher Madraswala started his career at Intel designing microprocessors and later overseeing ASIC development before joining Open-Silicon at its inception. During his 25 year semiconductor career Taher has experienced more than 300 tapeouts across a wide variety of applications.
Today Open-Silicon applies an open business… Read More
Once a year, during the TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Forum you can expect to see cutting edge technical achievements by TSMC and their partners. This year was no exception, with Open-Silicon presenting its accomplishments in implementing an HBM reference design in 16nm. It’s well understood that HBM offers huge benefits… Read More
As IP expert Eric Esteve has written, Semiconductor IP has consistently outgrown the other design enablement segments and will continue to do so. This has been my personal experience as well during my EDA and IP career so we should all know how important Semiconductor IP is. We certainly know how valuable it is with ARM valued at $32B!… Read More
The History of ASICs is well documented in our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” which illustrates the earliest forms of design start driven collaboration. The history of ARM is well documented in our book “Mobile Unleashed” which illustrates an entire company culture based on design start driven… Read More
A couple months ago we heard from another vendor in a webinar on HBM and breaking through the “memory wall”. Next week Open Silicon weighs in on the topic in a webinar with partners SK Hynix and Synopsys.… Read More
Wandering around DAC this week, I found much of the discussion focused on the EDA community being at an inflection point. How do we get more design starts from new places with new ideas without jeopardizing existing business? It’s not as simple a transition as it sounds.… Read More
If you look back at the beginning of the ASIC business you will see that it was really a critical time in the semiconductor industry. It all began in the 1980s which coincidentally is when I started my career in Silicon Valley. General purpose integrated circuits ruled the market, forcing system designers to cobble together off-the-shelf… Read More
We’ve been saying for a while that it looks like there is a resurgence in design starts for ASICs targeting the IoT. A recent webinar featuring speakers from ARM and Open Silicon (and moderated by Daniel Nenni) affirms this trend, and provides some insight on how these designs may differ from typical microcontrollers.
One of my first… Read More
IoT products call for a higher level of system integration than ever before. Companies seeking to go to market now have a much higher bar in terms of size, power, reliability and manufacturability. The first IoT devices evolved from embedded development boards, like the groundbreaking Arduino. These were fine for prototypes … Read More
In 2003, when Open-Silicon was founded there was a growing need for flexible and innovative ways of getting chip designs manufactured. Semiconductor companies, given the alternatives of COT or traditional ASIC, often were looking for more flexibility without the huge investment and risk of going COT. Let’s look at how Open-Silicon… Read More
