Planning For The Unexpected


Last month we undertook a big family trip. My parents, my brother and his family came from Belgium to California, and together we embarked on a trip across the Northwest United States. Starting in Silicon Valley we drove via Lake Tahoe and Salt Lake City to Yellowstone. Afterward, we crossed over to Seattle and Portland to finish off the trip with visits to Crater Lake and Lassen Volcanic Natio... » read more

Resurrecting The Semiconductor Industry


Every so often the semiconductor industry approaches a wall, and it takes the best minds in the world to figure out whether to go left, right, below, above or through it. As an industry we faced that at 1 micron, and again at 45nm with lithography. Now we are approaching another wall. Complexity has exploded—hardware, software, IP and process technologies—while the entire time-to-market cy... » read more

Solving A Problem In Reverse


It has been a while since I selected a [getkc id="16" comment="patent"] just because of the humorous side it presents. Today, I will remedy that and talk about a patent that would appear to solve exactly the opposite problem that most people have. It is related to the use of chopsticks. While I am fairly dexterous at using them these days, there was a time when the food would be cold before I h... » read more

The Agony Of Hardware-Assisted Development Choices


“When defining a product, if you haven’t upset at least one part of the organization, then the product is probably ill defined and tries to address too many things!” That’s what one of my mentors taught me early on in my career as product manager. Ever since then I have been interested in portfolio management. The most recent announcement that we made on the Protium Rapid Prototyping Pl... » read more

ST Announces 20x Savings Using OpenPDK At DAC


Last month’s Design Automation Conference in San Francisco proved to be highly successful for Si2. This year, for example, Si2 organized 28 member-led presentations, issued 10 press releases, and hosted 5 special events. Today I will focus on one of those events, a special press conference featuring Philippe Magarshack, executive vice president for design enablement services at STMicroelectro... » read more

Does IoT Change Design?


Over the past few months, and especially at DAC, I have been struck by the amount of interest in IoT and its impact on semiconductor design. In this post I will look at how IoT impacts the life of system designers — and explore if it really changes anything. Important source of semiconductor growth IoT is clearly important to investors, semiconductor makers, IP and EDA because it expands ... » read more

Everyone Is A Programmer


There was a time when so many people didn’t know how to program their VCRs that OEMs stopped adding clocks because it was embarrassing to have them constantly blinking “12:00.” We’ve come a long way since VCRs. And that means all of us. While engineers have always enjoyed tinkering with technology, what’s changed is that everyone tinkers with technology now. Everyone programs phone... » read more

Linux And The Big Bad Wolf


With great interest, I am following any news around the progress of Linaro and the Linux kernel community with regard to addressing all the requirements for an ARMv8 64-bit server software stack. Well-established standards, such as the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), are impacting the development direction of the community b... » read more

3 Challenges Of Delivering Configurable Semiconductor IP


Over time, commercial IP products have morphed from single function blocks to 100% configurable IPs where no two instances are the same. In this article I point out the challenges of creating configurable IP, and the best-known practices to address them. IP Configurability Spectrum Throughout the history of chip design, there has been a spectrum of configurability that has been built into i... » read more

Game Of Eco Systems


My first ever blog post on May 28, 2008, was called “May you live in interesting times …”, starting with “the view from the top” at Synopsys. At the time, my focus was abstraction levels and how the industry has been moving upwards for decades. While it is not a Chinese proverb after all (read my blog above), we still do live in interesting times, perhaps more so that ever. One of the... » read more

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