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CEO Interview: Albert Li of Platform DA

CEO Interview: Albert Li of Platform DA
by Daniel Nenni on 11-27-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: CEO Interviews, EDA, FinFET, Platform Design Automation

Platform Design Automation, Inc (PDA). recently closed a US$6 million pre Series A investment round, and the company has shifted its focus from providing SPICE modeling related software and services to forming a complete AI-driven ecosystem from probing to simulation. Albert Li was the GM of Accelicon, a leading EDA tool and service vendor on device modeling, and it was acquired by Agilent in 2012. Albert is now founder and CEO of PDA, a 4-yr old high tech company that provides a comprehensive set of products and services on semiconductor device characterization instruments, device modeling and PDK validation software.


SPICE Modeling market is saturated and shrinking, what new products or technologies that PDA developed to attract a major investment?
Yes, my team was known for providing SPICE modeling software and services for leading semiconductor companies, and it is also true that the marketing is shrinking due to the consolidations of semiconductor manufacturing and design companies. But with process continues to scale down, we did discover strong needs of having faster device characterization solutions to obtain large samples of measurements to account for the increasing process variations, and having sufficient silicon data is really the key to enable accurate simulations. So we expanded our scopes to device characterization solutions, where we have a lot of hands-on experiences and know-how, also we have been working on optimization technologies (for model extraction purpose) for more than a decade, so we were one of the pioneers to apply machine-learning algorithms to achieve faster simulations such as statistical simulations and we now apply these algorithms to achieve faster measurements.

Our first device characterization instrument is NC300, the world’s fastest 1/f noise characterization solution, providing 10X speed improvements over other products on the market and for production tests, it can achieve 100X speed improvements thanks to our AI driven technologies. NC300 was quickly adopted by the leading semiconductor companies, which gave us the confidence to develop new semiconductor parametric test solutions with broader scopes, we combined machine learning algorithms, user know-how and huge amount of previous data and experiences for the training and these have generated very promising results and we will soon release a new product line that can achieve much faster parametric testing speed for semiconductor applications.

What are the products that PDA is currently offering?
There are three main EDA products and the first one is for device modeling and QA called MeQLaband it can be used for applications like:

  • Device modeling for FinFET and planar devices
  • Statistical modeling and mismatch
  • High voltage device modeling, sub-circuit modeling
  • Built-in modeling library and model card QA
  • SRAM modeling
  • Noise modeling and circuit analysis
  • Design or process optimization

PQLab is a tool for automating the QA of PDK libraries, saving engineering time and can be applied to:

  • Foundry PDK developers needing to QA a PDK
  • IC designers verify that a foundry PDK meets their requirements
  • IC designers compare two or more PDKs

For 1/f noise measurements and characterization they have the NC300 system to apply at the wafer level, device, circuit or even with sensors.

You have been working on device modeling throughout your career, what are the challenges in device modeling posed by the latest process technologies such as FinFET?
Again, the increasing process variations are the key challenges, a lot of layout dependencies such as stress related layout dependencies, lithography introduced dependencies, need to be taken into account during device modeling. For FinFET, even though the new process introduced more dependencies, for example sometimes even the shape of metal2 over a device plays significant impact on device performance, but thanks to the rigorous design rule, there are only a few fixed layout combinations that are allowed by the design rule, so the required modeling efforts are actually less. To model the process variations accurately, the key is still to obtain sufficient silicon data to produce accurate statistics, and again faster measurements are in great needs. And for designers, the foundry corner models or statistical models are often conservative, in my experience, having some silicon data on the design side to adjust model or corner is the quickest way to achieve design margin, as the model/design kit itself is a source of margin loss.

What are the future technology trend for SPICE Modeling?
Having sufficient data is really the key to the problem, if data is sufficient, model can be automatically generated or synthesized. The concept has already been applied to the case of passive device modeling, such as modeling inductors. EM solvers play the role of proving more “data” or the synthesizers to generate models automatically. We’ve been working with the same concept for the active devices for quite a while, one way is to enable faster measurements, so that a lot more data can be collected and the other way is to achieve huge amount of data based on limited silicon through machine learning, which requires deep understanding of device behaviors, device modeling knowledge, data for the training and years of training experiences, we have already successfully applied the methodologies to our service projects, and tedious tasks such as model re-targeting is now purely done by machines.

Machine Learning enabled model targeting from tweaking model parameters to just defining the targets and let the machine finish the job automatically

What are other areas in semiconductor you see that Machine Learning can help?
We’ve published 3 papers in the past few years related to machine learning, and we used machine-learning algorithms to help on speeding up soft error simulation of logic circuits, automatic statistical modeling, and automatic RF front-end design,so the areas of machine-learning applications are massive. Algorithms, expertise, data and risk are the four key components to access Machine-Learning applications, take device characterization and modeling as examples, we have been working on the machine learning algorithms for over a decade, and we are definitely the experts in device characterization and modeling, we also have huge amount of data and models from previous projects, and these enabled us to train our software or instrument to achieve faster measurements and automatic model generations.

How do you position PDA?
Our products address device characterization, modeling and PDK validation, and all of our products will be driven by machine learning to achieve faster measurement and faster simulation. We have 3 dedicated Ph.ds from Tsinghua working on algorithm development for years, and we continue to increase our investment on experimenting different algorithms, and training. So I would position PDA as a solution company with AI as the core competence and our ultimate goal is to continuously improve speed and effeciency for our customers from probing to simulations.

Also Read:

CEO Interview: Mike Wishart of efabless

CEO Interview: Chouki Aktouf of Defacto Technologies

Executive Interview: Vic Kulkarni of ANSYS

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REUSE 2016 is Next Week at the Computer History Museum!

REUSE 2016 is Next Week at the Computer History Museum!
by Daniel Nenni on 11-26-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Events

The first REUSE Semiconductor IP Tradeshow and Conference is next week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Given the importance of IP I would strongly suggest attending this event. The presentation abstracts are up now and there are a few I want to highlight as they are companies that we work with on SemiWiki:

HBM2 IP Subsystem Solution for High Bandwidth Memory Applications:
The most common memory requirements for emerging applications, such as high performance computing, networking, deep learning, virtual reality, gaming, cloud computing and data centers, are high bandwidth and density based on real-time random operations. High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) meets this requirement and delivers unprecedented bandwidth, power efficiency and small form factor.

HBM2 (X1024) offers the maximum possible bandwidth of up to 256 GBps compared to 4GBps with DDR3 (X16) at 1/3[SUP]rd[/SUP] of the power efficiency. HBM2 and 2.5D silicon interposer integration unlock new system architectures, therefore, causing HBM2 ASIC SiP (system-in-package) to gain popularity among OEMs. One of the key IPs used to develop these ASIC SiPs is the HBM IP subsystem that consists of controller, PHY and die2die I/O. Open-Silicon’s HBM2 IP subsystem fully complies with the HBM2 JEDEC® standard.

The IP translates user requests into HBM command sequences (ACT, Pre-Charge) and handles memory refresh, bank/page management and power management on the interface. The high performance, low latency controller leverages the HBM parallel architecture and protocol efficiency to achieve maximum bandwidth. The IP includes a scalable and optimized PHY and die-to-die I/O needed to drive the interface between the logic-die and the memory die-stack on the 2.5D silicon interposer.

Open-Silicon’s HBM2 IP subsystem addresses the implementation challenges associated with interoperability, 2.5D design, overall SiP design, packaging, test and manufacturing. Multiple built-in test and diagnostic features, such as probe pads and loop-back for issue-isolation within the various IP subsystem components, not only address the test and debug challenges, but help in yield management and yield improvement, while ramping HBM2 ASIC designs into volume production. Open-Silicon’s HBM2 first implementation solution in TSMC 16nm FF+ features 2Gbps per pin data rate at up to 5mm trace length. This enables a full 8-channel connection from a 16nm SoC to a single HBM2 memory stack at 2Gbps, achieving bandwidths up to 256GB/s.

2:30pm-3:00pm Boole Room: Dhananjay Wagh , Principal IP Architect & Innovation Manager of Open-Silicon

A Vibrant 3rd Party IP Ecosystem is Critical to the Growth of the Semiconductor Industry
The third-party IP ecosystem plays a critical role in the growth of the semiconductor industry. Taher Madraswala, president and CEO of Open-Silicon, will discuss the state of the IP market and how the functional integration of IPs is driving new market applications.

He will discuss the importance of choosing the right IPs in order to achieve first time silicon success, as well as the benefits of leveraging third-party IP compared to internal IP development. Taher will describe case studies of complex SoCs, completed for leading OEMs, that were highly successful through leveraging the third-party IP ecosystem. Designers are finding new ways to produce less expensive SoCs with 2.5D interposer based system-in-package (SiP) designs, which enable a mix and match of chip/IP components at optimum process nodes.

This approach will greatly increase the reuse of IP developed at older process nodes. Additionally, as IP integration costs are increasing due to the rising number of discrete IP blocks in the current generation of SoCs, designers are leveraging IP subsystem-based design methodologies to lower development cost and risk. Continued developments in the third-party IP ecosystem, for new trends like 2.5D SiP and IP subsystems, will enable the semiconductor industry to continue to innovate and evolve.

4:30-5:00pm Hahn Auditorium: Taher Madraswala, President and CEO of Open-Silicon
And don’t forget I will be giving away signed copies of “Mobile Unleashed” at the cocktail reception from 5pm-7pm. Register for REUSE 2016 for free HERE. You can read more about Open-Silicon on SemiWiki HERE.

I hope to see you there! By the way, “Mobile Unleashed” currently has a five star rating on Amazon!

Also read: Bringing the Semiconductor IP Community Together!

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Automobility: The End of Infotainment

Automobility: The End of Infotainment
by Roger C. Lanctot on 11-25-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: Automotive

Padmasree Warrior, CEO and chief development officer of NextEV USA, kicked off day two of the LA Auto Show’s Automobility LA with a powerful perspective on the current state of the automotive industry. She rattled off the usual litany of congestion, highway fatalities, emissions and changing usage and ownership models before defining NextEV’s vision of driving to be built around the car as a safe, green companion.

Warrior’s voice is an important one as the only female CEO in the automotive industry other than Mary Barra at General Motors and for her headline-grabbing move from chief technology officer of Cisco to NextEV. Her vision of automotive architecture is a comprehensive reimagining of the automotive hardware and software stack to focus on safety, connectivity gateway, firewall and Ethernet-based network technology.

She noted that consumers are losing minutes, hours, weeks and years of their lives stuck in traffic while car makers offer nothing more than buttons, gadgets and displays. She said innovation must be focused on safety and autonomy in order to give back time to consumers to restore the attractiveness of the car as an object of aspiration.

Through her comments, Warrior highlighted the fact that Apple and Alphabet, with their CarPlay and Android Auto integrations, have commoditized in-vehicle infotainment. The unintended consequence is that infotainment is no longer essential or differentiating. What is important is that the car delivers a safe operating environment acting as a companion to the owner/driver.

The car should seamlessly detect and provide for the needs and desires of the occupants with an emphasis on avoiding harm and distraction. The safety first message is at odds with the bells and whistles obsession of auto makers and their suppliers. The de-emphasis of infotainment was a powerful counter-argument to the news item that started the week of the show early Monday morning – Samsung’s acquisition of Harman International, the number two supplier by revenue – according to Strategy Analytics estimates – of automotive infotainment systems.

With her comments at Automobility Warrior nearly singlehandedly let the air out of the tires of financial handicappers who hailed the Samsung acquisition – with some, including commentator Jim Kramer, asserting that Apple missed an opportunity. For Warrior, as she concluded her presentation, “It’s not about driving. It’s about being.”

It’s a compelling statement that only heightens that anticipation of what NextEV may have in store. It’s challenging to bring a new vision to a 125-year-old industry served by dozens of car makers, but Warrior appears to have done just that.

Delivering on that vision will be Warrior’s next challenge. Fellow automotive EV startup Faraday Future kicked off its own ambitious program with a snazzy supercar announced at CES 2016 along with plans for a billion-dollar factory across town from Tesla Motors’ own gigafactory. We are still waiting for the full Faraday vision to unfold – and now we await NextEV.

But the message was clear and important in the wake of the Samsung-Harman hookup. We are seeing the end of infotainment as we know it. Consumers are looking for a safe, green companion, according to Warrior. Buckle up.

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Microsoft Ignite 2016: Stepping On The Enterprise Accelerator

Microsoft Ignite 2016: Stepping On The Enterprise Accelerator
by Patrick Moorhead on 11-25-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: General

At the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Atlanta, Microsoft announced a series of major capabilities across Windows, Office, Azure, Dynamics and Cortana. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella highlighted, like he has in so many other of his big-tent speeches, the importance of enabling IT to drive the digital transformation in businesses today. While I’ve heard the digital transformation storyline many times from many vendors, Nadella always finds a way to make it differentiated if not compelling and interesting. He just gets it.


Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and “Neon” Deion Sanders ham it up on-stage with NFL chat-bots at Ignite (Photo credit: Patrick Moorhead)

At Ignite, Microsoft highlighted major improvements to security, intelligence, and their cloud offerings under the theme of “empowering” IT pros. Ignite isn’t about departments or end users going around IT, this is about IT. Those were the folks in the audience so this makes perfect sense. Microsoft already has a good reputation of enabling IT pros tied to Microsoft’s cornerstone products like Windows, Office, dev tools like Visual Studio, server-side products like Exchange and SharePoint, and Azure. Microsoft’s job at the show was to show they can accelerate that into the future while not ignoring their current investments.

The Ignite announcements are all part of Microsoft’s gradual transformation towards more intelligent and secure platforms that utilize machine learning and AI to transform the way we all get stuff done. I wanted to talk about a few security, cloud and AI announcements from the show and share my quick take on it. I’ll be following up in details on specific areas in the future.

Security and Application Guard
While it’s always a challenge to make security exciting, the most important part of Microsoft’s announcements at Ignite were the company’s improvements to security, and it’s driven by the realities businesses attending Ignite face today and will into the future. When you consider the threat plane wideningwith mobility and IoT, and threats getting deeperwith state-sponsored hacking, security has to be the first thing that gets talked about before any feature or capability enhancements.

I believe the most interesting security announcement was Window Defender Application Guard. It’s designed to make Microsoft’s Edge browser the most secure browser for the enterprise, powered by a virtualization-based security technology and containers. I can still see the classic enterprise using Internet Explorer for older web apps, but using Edge with Application Guard for everything else including newer enterprise apps. If users use Application Guard and hit a website that isn’t white-listed, the page visually gets flagged, users can use the website, but it has limited functionality. It can’t screen scrape, access the file system nor does it have access to network resources.

Application Guard is one of this “why didn’t this happen before” ideas and gets you wondering, “why didn’t see get this before”? Architecturally, Windows 10 improved the ability to secure everything, adding a system container to place all trusted executions inside. Microsoft made everything more secure by removing it from the classic Kernel-Platform Services-Apps stack and tied security directly to a separate “security stack” that is tied to hardware VBS or “virtualization-based security”. VBS is tied right to ARM Holdings, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel’s hardware-based virtualization.


The Windows 10 stack separates OS from security (Photo credit: Microsoft)

While I have talked about Application Guard only in the context Edge browser, expect to see it across other applications over time.

Additionally, Microsoft’s Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP) and Office 365 ATP now share security intelligence mutually across both services. Office 365 ATP threat protection will also be extended to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Microsoft also talked about their upcoming Secure Productive Enterprise E5, which is designed to offer the most advanced security and productivity across all of Microsoft’s core products. This is being paired with enterprise mobility to enable expanded security to help the move towards the cloud and mobility.

Azure Cloud
Microsoft surprised many with their ascension to a top-tier, public cloud player. In fact, they’re the #2 market share cloud player only to Amazon.com’s AWS. Microsoft said at Ignite they had 120K new customer sign-upsmonthly. Yes, monthly.


Microsoft offers Azure on-prem, IaaS, PaaS, and in SaaS cloud (Photo credit: Patrick Moorhead)

They have been successful by investing billions into global datacenters, creating a full (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) cloud stack, by supporting what would have been considered taboo like Linux and Docker containers, and through a good understanding of what enterprises really want related to SLAs. Microsoft gets IT, many others don’t. Just because a company is great in consumer cloud services doesn’t make you good at business services. In fact, history shows that it’s difficult to nearly impossible to do well in commercial markets if your core is consumer, and vice versa. Some of the improved capabilities announced at Ignite include new Azure monitoring abilities combined with updates to their operations management suite. Microsoft gets IT, many others don’t.

Microsoft’s cloud approach is “have it your way” by supporting a “hybrid” approach, from one spectrum with on-prem private cloud to a full SaaS model. Azure Stack is a huge play here and at Ignite Microsoft announced its three lead partners for the platform, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Dell EMC, and Lenovo. Microsoft also announced its second technical preview of Azure Stack. Interestingly, only Lenovo doesn’t sell their own cloud stack as Dell EMC has vCloud Air/Suite and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has Helion. I’ll be keeping my eye on the Lenovo-Microsoft Azure cloud play very closely. If Microsoft can be the first company to seamlessly connect on-prem legacy to on-prem cloud to public cloud, they and their partners could find themselves in the cloud driver’s seat. Ironic, right?

Democratizing AI and FPGA “magic blue crystals”
At the end of day one, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, came back on stage to deliver the message that Microsoft “democratizes AI” by providing any level of AI, be it agent (Cortana), applications, services and infrastructure. Microsoft does, in fact, provide AI and ML capabilities in many different forms and is taking different but related approaches versus Google, Amazon.com, or IBM. Nadella delivered the vision but also showed some cool NFL AI chat bot examples aligned with their CaaP (conversations as a platform) strategy. Somehow, Microsoft managed to find a fun way to get Neon Deion Sanders on stage to ham it up. I thought it worked and wasn’t cheesy.

At the end of Nadella’s AI stage presence, Microsoft intelligently focused on some of the “magic blue crystals” (my description) of some things that distinguish Microsoft, and that was FPGAs. Microsoft got wonderfully geeky, even to my chip-making past desires, going into AI workload benchmarks. It was great. They explained what they described as the world’s largest deployment of custom developed FPGAs that span 15 countries and 5 continents. This is potentially huge for the future of Microsoft’s cloud platform as it signifies Microsoft’s own investment into FPGAs as a way to accelerate machine learning and AI. Senior analyst Karl Freund wrote about Microsoft’s FPGA Ignite disclosures here.


Behold the power of Microsoft FPGA deployed at Azure (Credit: Patrick Moorhead)

I find it immensely ironic that hardware is held up as a differentiator.

Wrapping up
At Ignite, Microsoft needed to show IT that they not only understood them and could support them today, but also be a reliable and innovative supplier of next generation technology for tomorrow. I believe Microsoft did both as they sprinkled AI dust on Windows, Office, Dynamics, and security while wowing the crowd with details on their AI and intelligence future with a hat tip to their hardware differentiation with FPGAs. And in the center of it all is Azure and Azure Stack, the glue that holds everything together. It’s amazing to me how far Microsoft has come in the past two years and Ignite was a good showcase for Microsoft to show this off to their IT customers.

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Is your #IoT cup half empty or half full?

Is your #IoT cup half empty or half full?
by Diya Soubra on 11-25-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: IoT

While the optimist and the pessimist argued about whether the cup was half empty or half full, I drank it !

I had seen the above statement a while ago and it jumped to mind while I was considering the state of #IoT today. That funny statement describes exactly the mindset of the players in the market. While the majority argue back and forth about privacy, security, data formats and alliances, others are busy deploying solutions and capturing revenue.

Yes, there are many items that we would prefer to be in a different stable state but there is nothing really blocking deployment, proof being the variety of success stories out there. Here is my take on the items at the centre of the debate.

Security
We all agree that the system needs to be secure end-to-end. While the argument continues about the level of required security, the cryptography algorithms and secure protocols to use, others are deploying nodes with today’s state of the art security and learning from field experience what is enough and what isn’t. The key is not just how to secure the solution but how to recover it once it is hacked since it is by now clear that all known security of today will for sure be hacked in the near future. Make sure the node can be updated with new firmware.

Privacy
This is my favourite item. People still want to believe that they have some privacy. Well, guess what, If you carry a smart phone then you have already given up all your privacy. But let us avoid that discussion. What about the thousands of #IoT applications that are not about reporting people related information. Why not start capturing revenue with those and once a privacy decree is handed down then go after people related #IoT markets. Sell the products that you have today.

Data Format
It does not matter what format the data is in when it arrives from the node since it has to be reformatted any way to fit the analytics system it is destined for. The conversion will be done in the cloud using web technology where we have infinite affordable compute. Why wait for that magic universal data base that will have all formats predefined for all types of possible sensors. Conversion is simple and affordable.

Radios
What is all the fuss about the radio standard to be used. Yes, there are many different radio standards in use today and each is better suited for a specific product market. Eventually, mobile operators will figure out a reasonable business model and NB-IoT will win over everything else but there is no need to wait since that day may never come. The radio is just the means to transport the data. As technology improves we will see new variations. Go with the flow.

Protocols
IP to the edge, CoAP, mesh, Thread, or any other discovery and transport protocol, the list of acronyms is very long. Does it really matter that everyone should agree with your choice? It would be good if everyone agreed to use the same set but they will not for a while. Meanwhile, whoever is shipping is lowly becoming the de-facto standard. So do not wait, populate.

Cost
The serious revenue is in the analytics and predictive services. The end points are just the means to generate the data that fuels the analytics engine. There is no reason to waste any effort or resource in a cost reduction exercise for endpoints since the economies of scale will kick in as volume picks up. Besides, whatever the cost of the endpoint maybe it is for sure tiny compared with the revenue generated from the analytics. Would any one think twice about investing $10 when it will produce $1000 or more?

I prefer to continue down the road while watching for the pot holes instead of staying in my spot waiting for someone to pave the road for me and everyone else. Lead, don’t follow.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Google Pixel And Home Event: A Quick, Industry Technology Analyst Take

Google Pixel And Home Event: A Quick, Industry Technology Analyst Take
by Patrick Moorhead on 11-24-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: General

I just completed watching Google’s special hardware event and wanted to share my high-level, industry analyst take on it.

Google Assistant
Everything Google showed on-stage was very compelling, but as we have seen with most claims in intelligent assistants, rarely if ever have they lived up to the hype. Until consumers can truly rely on assistants, they will continue to be a niche use case. Google Voice and Google Now are very high quality, but to claim game-changer, Google Assistant must do what it did on stage to really set it apart and I’ll have to do a lot of testing before I’m there. Consumers must keep in mind that this personal information is being mined by Google to create improved advertising profiles.



Pixel phone
Google intelligently amped up their camera development and message as consumers care about this a lot. The 89 rating on DxOMark is impressive and using a gyroscope to compensate for video jitter is unique. Now DXO mark is nice, but may not compensate for the lack of a second lens for telephoto and also, until the camera is tested, we won’t know if they’ve compromised the experience in other ways to hit that impressive score. I’m surprised Google didn’t opt for two cameras as it’s rapidly becoming standard on premium phones. Apple, Huawei, and LG have dual camera features. Free unlimited storage in highest quality mode is a great deal but only if you like the pictures. I expect Pixel photo experience to be good but probably not great by comparison.

I was really happy to see Pixel sport literally the latest and greatest Qualcomm chipset, the Snapdragon 821. Google didn’t specify support for modem features, but I am hopeful it supports T-Mobile’s new 4×4 MIMO, 256 QAM network, literally, the latest and greatest out there in the U.S.

The 7 hours of battery with 15 minutes charging, auto-updates, 24×7 customer care with chat, voice, and screen share are nice, but aren’t necessarily reason anyone prefers a phone.

I believe the lack of an SD card will be an issue as Samsung learned the hard way with Android users and I expect them to add one in the next generation. Apple can pull this off in the premium space but not Android. Also, I was surprised Google didn’t make the case for some optimized microphone array, too, that worked better with Google Assistant.

Aside from the camera, the new Google Pixels are pretty undifferentiated compared to premium Samsung and Apple’s 7th generation phones and don’t exactly swing anyone around the room with some new feature no one has seen before or hit some new low price point.

Daydream View
It appears Google put a lot of thought into this VR headset previously hinted at Google I/O. The Google VR content with YouTube, Maps, Photos and Movies are strong when presented, but details were limited as to how many titles are available. VR is made or broken with content. To break VR out of the early adopter stage, Google will need to give the sense that there is a lot of content or face lack of adoption and keep it niche. Also lacking were details on how Google is keeping people from getting sick, a big issue with today’s mobile headsets as they don’t have the 90 frames-per-second bar PC-base.

The biggest limiter is that Daydream View is tied to a Pixel phone, so consumers cannot use Samsung, LG, or HTC-branded phones. The $79 price is killer low, but in some ways, you get what you pay for in VR.



Google Home
Google Home is a lot like Amazon.com Echo with a few differentiators. Home, as expected, is powered by Google Assistant, which means it delivers more natural language speech than Echo. With my Amazon.com Echo experiences, I needed to almost “learn” a new language. Home also appears to have access to more information and be able to answer more questions as well. I will have to test this out myself before I can definitively say one way or the other but Google has better services related to search so all this makes sense. I am wondering, too how multiple accounts and voices are handled. I like the capacitive touch on top of Home and hope it can be programmed to do more than mute and volume control.

As with Google Assistant, consumers must keep in mind that this personal information is being mined by Google to create improved advertising profiles.



Net-net
It was a good event, but Google created stratospherically high expectations for the event which I believe the company failed to live up to. The new Pixel phones didn’t bring much new to the conversation and they lacked dual cameras, an expected feature of a $649 phone. I believe it will take time for the connected home play to fully sink in, but if it can truly deliver as it did on stage, Google may have moved the industry a step forward, albeit with privacy concerns. I hope to use the devices and run them through their paces very shortly and will let you know!

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Uber: From Ride Hail to Blackmail

Uber: From Ride Hail to Blackmail
by Roger C. Lanctot on 11-24-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Automotive

The U.S. State of Maryland is in the midst of a confrontation with Uber over fingerprints. Maryland wants Uber (and Lyft) to collect the fingerprints of its drivers as part of its background check process. Uber does not want to do so and is threatening to leave the state.

In the run up to a Maryland Public Service Commission hearing to consider the fingerprinting issue this past week, Uber called on supporters from among its 30,000 drivers and undetermined number of passengers (who have accounted for 10M rides since Uber arrived in Maryland, according to the company) to rally on its behalf. A decision on the matter is expected by December 15, when the fingerprint requirement will go into effect for all transportation network companies.

The threat to leave the state is a pressure tactic. Uber is trying to turn the tables on the regulators, forcing them to consider the welfare, convenience and livelihoods of Uber drivers and passengers. Ironically, given multiple instances of criminal behavior by Uber drivers, that is precisely the concern of the Maryland Public Service Commission.

The threat to leave the state suggests that Uber believes it is not only on the right side of the question from a legal and fairness standpoint, but that it has the support of Maryland’s Uber drivers and passengers sufficient to tip the Commission’s decision in its favor. I personally believe Uber is over-playing its hand. Threatening a public agency sets a bad precedent for future interactions.

It reminds me of the influence and impact of Waze. Waze has launched its Connected Citizens Program to engage with cities to obtain and integrate local traffic information sources while sharing its own traffic info.

Like Uber, Waze influences the markets in which it participates. One can imagine a scenario where Waze might threaten an uncooperative city with carmaggedon should that city choose not to participate in the program.

That’s a purely hypothetical scenario, but Waze does wreak havoc on traffic on a daily basis routinely diverting drivers onto little known and little used side streets to sidestep traffic jams. Some Connected Citizens Program participants have sought to engage with Waze to better manage Waze’s unwelcome diversions.

The Uber threat to leave Maryland is a darker matter. There’s no reason why Uber can’t add fingerprinting to its existing background check procedures.

Uber claims that fingerprinting introduces racial bias into the process as minorities tend to have more criminal history on their records. The local taxi and limousine commission, which already uses fingerprinting, notes that minorities are actually over-represented among the ranks of current checked and certified drivers – contradicting Uber’s claim.

Unlike Waze which is seeking to engage in a constructive manner with municipalities, Uber seems to be caught in constant struggles with regulators throughout the world. This contentious mode of operation leaves travelers and other potential customers constantly asking: “Is Uber legal here?”

Even worse, the ongoing battles for market share with incumbent cab drivers often leads to violent interactions on the street in places such as Paris and Rio de Janeiro. That is enough to give some potential fares pause before they hail that Uber.

Given Uber’s intentions to disrupt all public transportation and possibly the automobile industry as a whole, there is no reason to be sympathetic to Uber. The short-term gain of cheap fares is not worth the occasional and horrible criminal activity engaged in by improperly vetted Uber drivers. If Uber can’t play by the rules it shouldn’t be allowed on the playing field.

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These 6 new technology rules will govern our future

These 6 new technology rules will govern our future
by Vivek Wadhwa on 11-24-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: General

Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We have already begun to see ways in which computing, sensors, artificial intelligence and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives. As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions that we have relied will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Here are six:

1. Anything that can be digitized will be.
Digitization began with words and numbers. Then we moved into games and later into rich media, such as movies, images and music. We also moved complex business functions, medical tools, industrial processes and transportation systems into the digital realm. Now, we are digitizing everything about our daily lives: our actions, words and thoughts. Inexpensive DNA sequencing and machine learning are unlocking the keys to the systems of life. Cheap, ubiquitous sensors are documenting everything we do and creating rich digital records of our entire lives.

2. Your job has a significant chance of being eliminated.
In every field, machines and robots are beginning to do the work of humans. We saw this first happen in the Industrial Revolution, when manual production moved into factories and many millions lost their livelihoods. New jobs were created, but it was a terrifying time, and there was a significant societal dislocation (from which the Luddite movement emerged).

The movement to digitize jobs is well underway in low-salary service industries. Amazon relies on robots to do a significant chunk of its warehouse work. Safeway and Home Depot are rapidly increasing their use of self-service checkouts. Soon, self-driving cars will eliminate millions of driving jobs. We are also seeing law jobs disappear as computer programs specializing in discovery eliminate the needs for legions of associates to sift through paper and digital documents.

Soon, automated medical diagnosis will replace doctors in fields such as radiology, dermatology, and pathology. The only refuge will be in fields that are creative in some way, such as marketing, entrepreneurship, strategy and advanced technical fields. New jobs we cannot imagine today will emerge, but they will not replace all the lost jobs. We must be ready for a world of perennially high unemployment rates. But don’t worry, because…

3. Life will be so affordable that survival won’t necessitate having a job.
Note how cellphone minutes are practically free and our computers have gotten cheaper and more powerful over the past decades. As technologies such as computing, sensors and solar energy advance, their costs drop. Life as we know it will become radically cheaper. We are already seeing the early signs of this: Because of the improvements in the shared-car and car-service market that apps such as Uber enable, a whole generation is growing up without the need or even the desire to own a car. Health care, food, telecommunications, electricity and computation will all grow cheaper very quickly as technology reinvents the corresponding industries.

4. Your fate and destiny will be in your own hands as never before.
The benefit of the plummet in the costs of living will be that the technology and tools to keep us healthy, happy, well-educated and well-informed will be cheap or free. Online learning in virtually any field is already free. Costs also are falling with mobile-based medical devices. We will be able to execute sophisticated self-diagnoses and treat a significant percentage of health problems using only a smartphone and smart distributed software.

Modular and open-source kits are making DIY manufacture easier, so you can make your own products. DIYDrones.com, for example, lets anyone wanting to build a drone mix and match components and follow relatively simple instructions for building an unmanned flying device. With 3-D printers, you can create your own toys. Soon these will allow you to “print” common household goods — and even electronics. The technology driving these massive improvements in efficiency will also make mass personalization and distributed production a reality. Yes, you may have a small factory in your garage, and your neighbors may have one, too.

5. Abundance will become a far bigger problem than poverty.
With technology making everything cheaper and more abundant, our problems will arise from consuming too much rather than too little. This is already in evidence in some areas, especially in the developed world, where diseases of affluence — obesity, diabetes, cardiac arrest — are the biggest killers. These plagues have quickly jumped, along with the Western diet, to the developing world, as well. Human genes adapted to conditions of scarcity are woefully unprepared for conditions of a caloric cornucopia. We can expect this process only to accelerate as the falling prices of Big Macs and other products our bodies don’t need make them available to all.

The rise of social media, the Internet and the era of constant connection are other sources of excess. Human beings have evolved to manage tasks serially rather than simultaneously. The significant degradation of our attention spans and precipitous increase in attention-deficit problems that we have already experienced are partly attributable to spreading our attention too thin. As the number of data inputs and options for mental activity continues to grow, we will only spread it further. So even as we have the tools to do what we need to, forcing our brains to behave well enough to get things done will become more and more of a chore.

6. Distinction between man and machine will become increasingly unclear.
The controversy over Google Glass showed that society remains uneasy over melding man and machine. Remember those strange-looking glasses that people would wear, that were recording everything around them? Google discontinued these because of the uproar, but miniaturized versions of these will soon be everywhere. Implanted retinas already use silicon to replace neurons. Custom prosthetics that operate with the help of software are personalized, highly specific extensions of our bodies. Computer-guided exoskeletons are going into use in the military in the next few years and are expected to become a common mobility tool for the disabled and the elderly.

We will tattoo sensors into our bodies to track key health indicators and transmit those data wirelessly to our phones, adding to the numerous devices that interface directly with our bodies and form informational and biological feedback loops. As a result, the very idea of what it means to be human will change. It will become increasingly difficult to draw a line between human and machine.

This post is based on my upcoming book, “Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future,” which will be released this winter. You canpreorder it on Amazon.

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Bringing the Semiconductor IP Community Together!

Bringing the Semiconductor IP Community Together!
by Daniel Nenni on 11-23-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: eFPGA, Flex Logix, FPGA, IP

Next week is the first REUSE Semiconductor IP Tradeshow and Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. The presentation abstracts are up now and there are a few I want to highlight as they are companies that we work with on SemiWiki.
Continue reading “Bringing the Semiconductor IP Community Together!”

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Cadence Design Secures Photonic Beachhead

Cadence Design Secures Photonic Beachhead
by Mitch Heins on 11-23-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Cadence, EDA, Silicon Photonics

I had the privilege to attend a five-day PIC (photonic integrated circuit) training hosted by 7-Penniesand Tektronix in San Jose, CA this week. This training was quite comprehensive and covered photonic materials and platforms, design automation, fabrication, packaging and test. It also included invited talks from photonic luminaries such as Robert Blum of Intel, Peter de Dobbelaerre of Luxteraand Chris Cole of Finisaras well as hands-on training sessions from VPI Photonics, Lumerical Solutions, PhoeniX Softwareand Cadence Design. While there was much to take in from the training itself, the one item that struck me most was how completely Cadence Design has managed to secure a leadership position (e.g. a photonic beachhead) into what should not have been an area of strength. Let me explain.

PDA (Photonic Design Automation)
Integrated photonics has been going on for years and in fact there is an entire eco-system of PDA companies that have been working together for quite a while now that even have their own standards for tool integration. The group made up of PhoeniX Software, Filarete, Photon Design, VPI Photonics, Synopsys RSoft, Lumerical Solutions and OptiWave has a complete application programming interface defined that allows them to trade both design and PDK information back and forth enabling multiple different front-to-back flows for PIC design. All of these tool vendors also have wide support from various photonic fabrication and packaging facilities. PDKs are becoming more mature and multi-project wafer runs abound. Given this you would think one or more of these tools vendors would be well positioned to be king of the photonics hill.

EDA (Electronic Design Automation)
Meanwhile over the last five or more years Mentor Graphics has been quietly working away on inserting itself into the photonics supply chain using its Pyxis and Tanner layout editors which have the ability to do full angle rotations required for photonic design along with enhancements that have been made to Calibre for curvilinear design rule verification. This strong and early position in photonics would lead you to believe that perhaps Cadence had been caught with their proverbial pants down. It truly looked like they would be too late to the photonic dance and would be left on the outside looking in. Whoops! Got that one wrong.

EPDA (Electronic-Photonic Design Automation)

Last month we saw the fruits of Cadence’s labor as they showcased their EPDA integration with PhoeniX Software and Lumerical Solutions, arguably two of the most prolific PDA tool vendors in the market. While the technical solution is both elegant and powerful, the thing that woke me up to Cadence’s sudden position change in photonics was the presentations made by Intel, Luxtera and Finisar. All of these vendors had one thing in common. They all were in some way, shape or form integrating custom, high-speed and analog electrical ICs with their photonics.

Case in point is this slide from Luxtera. Note the progression of integration over time from left to right at the bottom of the slide (zoomed in sections). The point is that slowly but surely photonics is moving its way in towards the electronic ICs. Today it’s at the edge of the board. In the next year or so it’s on the board itself and before the end of decade it will be right next to, under or on the same die as the electronics.

OK, so what has that got to do with Cadence’s position in photonics? Everything.

For good or bad, Cadence owns the custom IC implementation market which includes the analog and mixed-signal ICs such as TIAs, high speed modulation and CDR (clock data recovery) circuits used in transceiver systems. As transceiver vendors move to higher channel rates they will be more constrained by the speed of the electronics that interface to the photonics than by the photonics themselves. That fact will require companies to have tighter integration of the two design domains (analog/mixed-signal electronics and photonics) to continue the inexorable march towards higher and faster bandwidth density. Cadence owns the installed base on the electronics side of that equation.

Moving forward, telecom and datacom are leading the way for photonics and as Cadence captures this space they will then be a natural solution for other photonics applications. In watching these presentations, I suddenly realized that Cadence wasn’t trying to penetrate a photonics beachhead. Cadence was already on the photonics beachhead all along and their integration to PhoeniX and Lumerical were meant to secure the beachhead by closing their last remaining weaknesses in the photonics space, namely native curvilinear shape and geometry manipulation (provided by PhoeniX) and photonic circuit simulation (provided by Lumerical). Remember also that Cadence has a strong lead in most things having to do with SiP (system in package), 2.5D and 3D integration of dice on interposers and modules which will be a must-have capability for electronic-photonic integration.

So, as I said back a month ago, the week of October 20[SUP]th[/SUP], 2016 should be marked as a watershed event for integrated photonics. Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s becoming clearer that Cadence has made a very relevant and strategic move. Makes you wonder what we will look back and see a year from now.