DoD Scratches Its Head Over Foundry Security


When the GlobalFoundries deal with IBM to acquire its foundries closes, as it is slated to sometime during 2015, the U.S. Department of Defense has a small problem on its hands. Military programs no longer will have access to a trusted fab to manufacture semiconductors. How do you ensure that the foundry did not modify or alter your design, add backdoor access or implement a remote control mech... » read more

Shift Left: Software Or Hardware?


A couple of weeks ago I was with a virtual prototyping user who described the benefits his company has seen from deploying virtual prototyping for early software development. The use of virtual prototyping has been rolled out progressively to more projects over the years, making it possible for the company to measure its impact on the software availability schedule and the impact has been drama... » read more

Big Data, Big Opportunities


For the last two decades I have spent a lot of my time managing operations and sales for several EDA startups, most of which were acquired. The focus of many of these companies was to provide solutions to optimize complex designs. We worked to enhance many of the top 25 semiconductor companies’ physical implementation flows using cutting edge technologies and methodologies to improve power, p... » read more

Thermal Interface Materials: The Unknown Entity?


Thermal interface materials (TIMs) are becoming more important in all application areas and between different component parts. Any semiconductor, ranging from LEDs to high-power electronics, is becoming smaller, yet producing more power. In many ways the physical design limits have been reached for packaging, allowing entire components to have a total thermal resistance of less than 0.1 K/W. Ho... » read more

DAC 2015: Day 5


I feel like the last man standing. The show floor is closed, most of the industry folks have gone and the other press is nowhere to be seen. The good news is that we are still here to cover the events of DAC and to bring you the whole show. The morning starts with a keynote entitled "Electronics for the Human Body." John Rogers from Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign talked about the mismatc... » read more

DAC 2015: Day 4


Are you ready for the self-driving car? Threats come from other cars – not necessarily hitting you but hacking you. Day four of DAC started with a keynote panel moderated by John McElroy of Blue Sky Productions and panelists included Jeff Massimilla from General Motors and Craig Smith from Theia Labs/OpenGarages.org/IATC. "What would happen if cars started picking up viruses," asked Anne C... » read more

When Things Go Wrong Even When You’re Doing the Right Thing


By Kurt Takara and Joe Hupcey III “Isolation. Retention. Level shifters. Dynamic voltage scaling. I’m doing all the right things to reduce the power consumption of my design by adding all of this power control logic. But because of this new low power circuitry, I’m seeing fresh clock domain crossing (CDC) problems that are making my design do all the wrong things; and my trusty old low... » read more

M&A Season Now Officially Open


A year ago many people were making jokes quite openly about the IoT. It wasn't uncommon to hear quips about the Internet of Nothing, the Internet of Disconnected Things, the Internet of Cars, or some other variant that questioned just how connected everything would become. The tenor of the conversation has changed significantly in the past year. The jokes are fewer, the stakes are higher. An... » read more

Toward Smarter Design Automation


In less than two weeks, the EDA industry will convene for its biggest conference of the year, the Design Automation Conference, again in San Francisco. Last year, I “came clean” with a post called “Confessions Of An ESL-Aholic,” pointing out that beyond high-level synthesis, a significant shift towards a more abstract design description than RTL has not yet happened and that a lot of th... » read more

Get Agile


History repeats itself, but frequently not in the exactly the same place. The problems faced by system engineering teams today—rising complexity, shorter market windows and more issues involving interactions that affect everything from dynamic power and leakage current to electromigration and finFET design—mirror the kinds of top-down issues that software developers began encountering more ... » read more

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