All Things Semiconductor!
I came across a report on the 100 most promising AI start-ups. The report claimed that CBInsights had “selected the 100 most promising AI start-ups from a pool of 3K+ companies based on several factors …” Wait, what … 3K+ companies!?!? This was a stunning reminder of the sheer magnitude of what is shaping up to be a veritable tsunami… Read More
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with a chip designer for an AI start-up to talk about using FPGA prototyping as part of a complex silicon verification strategy. Like countless other chip designers for whom simulation alone simply does not provide sufficient verification coverage, this AI start-up also believed that… Read More
I recently wrote about The Implications of the Rise of AI/ML in the Cloud. In that article, I wrote about my expectation that the rapidly growing AI market will lead to the accelerated use of high-level synthesis (HLS), prototyping, and emulation. In this article, I will focus on the prototyping portion of that – specifically FPGA… Read More
The ARM TechCon organizers are asking me what I thought of this year’s conference so here it goes. As you know I am a big fan of ARM TechCon and feel it is one of the better conferences for SoC design. This year however I noticed a big change in demographics. Maybe the location change had something to do with it but I definitely saw different… Read More
When we talk about the Internet of Things (IoT), it isn’t a stretch to say that every intelligent device we interact with will become connected, sharing vast amounts of data with one another to make our lives more efficient. It isn’t only consumers of smart home, infotainment, and wearable technologies that are driving the demand,… Read More
FPGAs have been used for ASIC prototyping since the beginning of FPGAs (1980s) allowing hardware and software designers to work in harmony developing, testing, and optimizing their products. We covered the history of FPGAs in Chapter 3 of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”, which includes … Read More
Hardware-assisted verification has been with us (commercially) for around 20 years and at this point is clearly mainstream. But during this evolution it split into at least two forms (emulation and prototyping), robbing us of a simple choice – to hardware-assist or not to hardware-assist (that is the question). Which in turn … Read More
I haven’t sat down to speak with S2C since we collaborated on the book, PROTOTYPICAL, published just before DAC 2016 and even then, I hadn’t spoken to Toshio Nakama, their CEO. Toshio splits his time between the San Jose headquarters and the Shanghai headquarters so getting time to meet face-to-face has been challenging. I was finally… Read More
This interview originally appeared as the foreword to our book “Prototypical: The Emergence of FPGA-based Prototyping for SoC Design” but I thought it would be worth publishing for those of you who have not downloaded it yet. I also wanted to mention that our friends at S2C are currently offering a 50% discount on the… Read More
OpenCL brings algorithm development into a unified programming model regardless of the core, working across CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and even FPGAs. Intel has been pushing OpenCL programming for some time, particularly at the high end with “Knights Landing” processors. Where other vendors are focused on straight-up C high-level … Read More
