As I have written before, IoT looks to be a key driver for design starts and future semiconductor revenue growth which is why we wrote “PROTOTYPICAL” and included a field guide to FPGA Prototyping. If you want to get funding for your new IoT chip project, having a working prototype is a good thing, absolutely. If you want to take a look… Read More
Design starts are critical to the growth of the semiconductor industry so enabling them is a common theme on SemiWiki. One thing we have not covered in detail is multi-project wafer services (MPW) which is the equivalent of ride sharing through the initial mask and wafer process. Larger semiconductor companies already do this … Read More
As we all know IoT (Internet of Things) is the “next big thing” across many different industries including the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. The first recorded IoT blog on SemiWiki was in 2014 and currently we have 173 IoT blogs posted that have earned more than 600,000 views and counting. So yes, IoT is the next big thing, absolutely.… Read More
Evolving opportunities call for new and improved solutions to handle data, bandwidth and power. Moving forward, what will be the high-growth applications that drive product and technology innovation? The CAGRs for smartphone and data center continue to be very strong and healthy. … Read More
One conversation topic I hear these days is: the Internet of Things is coming and all the devices will be intelligent. It will be achieved by embedding some kind of AI technology or machine learning or reasoning or whatever into the devices themselves. … Read More
You may have heard of the Landauer principle or the Landauer limit. This defines a lower bound on switching power dissipation in any form of digital circuit. Rolf Landauer first presented this principle in 1961, while working at IBM. It’s not limited by how the circuit is built – you can use FinFETS or spintronics or even dilithium… Read More
The Design Automation Conference is the largest and most diverse event in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. Next week in San Francisco you will see technology and people you have never seen before. You will benefit from the efforts of hundreds of thousands of semiconductor professionals like myself who have dedicated their… Read More
Paul McLellan wrote about how he stumbled into blogging and it inspired me to share my story as well. I grew up in Minnesota and attended the U of Minnesota earning a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering so that I could design computer chips. After interviewing in 1978 with HP, IBM, Intel and Motorola I decided to join… Read More
I am often asked how I became a blogger (or a journalist if you want to make it sound more professional). I think people assume that I planned it in some way but I never did. Life is what happens while you are making other plans. To see how unlikely it is, you need to know a bit of my background.
I have a PhD in computer science so I’m actually… Read More
After working in the semiconductor industry for the past thirty years and writing about it for the past six I would say that 2014 was one of the more interesting years of late. Vindication is the word that pops into my mind now that many “predictions” the fabless detractors have made over the last three years were proven wrong.
As a student… Read More
