TSMC’s Plan For Closing The Communication Gap


TSMC held its North American Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum at the Santa Clara County Convention Center on Sept. 25, providing a quick roadmap update and to recognize its partners for all the collaborative work needed to keep the TSMC innovation train rolling and enabling its customers to utilize the latest technologies. L.C. Lu, TSMC fellow and vice president of R&D, sai... » read more

Liquid Cooling, Meeting The Demands Of AI Data Centers


Many Porsche “purists” reflect forlornly upon the 1997, 5th generation, 996 version of the iconic 911 sports car. It was the first year of the water-cooled engine versions of the 911, which had previously been based on air-cooled engines since their entry into the market in 1964. The 911 was also the successor to the popular air-cooled 356. For over three decades, Porsche’s flagship 911 w... » read more

A New Generation Of 7400 Socket


When I was 18, and just been accepted at Brunel University in West London to start my undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering, I sent off a letter to Texas Instruments telling them about the journey ahead of me and asked if they could they send me a copy of their TTL Data Book. A few weeks later a package arrived and there it was. This incredible brown/orange book, thicker... » read more

Capturing Knowledge Within LLMs


At DAC this year, there was a lot of talk about AI and the impact it is likely to have. While EDA companies have been using it for optimization and improving iteration loops within the flow, the end users have been concentrating on how to use it to improve the user interface between engineers and tools. The feedback is very positive. Large language models (LLMs) have been trained on a huge a... » read more

CHIPS For America’s National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) Program


At this year’s Design Automation Conference, Jay Lewis, director of CHIPS for America National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) Program, gave a presentation on the status and direction of the Center, its priorities for this year and how the NSTC can change the long-term trajectory for innovation. Fig. 1: Dr. Jay Lewis, director of NSTC Program, CHIPS R&D Office at the Dept. o... » read more

The Value Of Innovation


This week's Design Automation Conference is all about the new things that are going on in the industry, both challenges and opportunities. By this time this blog goes live, I will have moderated a panel about why EDA has not been open to disruption. While preparing for that, a number of thoughts emerged in my mind. First, we have to remember that EDA is a business whose role is to support th... » read more

Margin Sensors In The Wild


Back in March, I wrote up an article here that looked at how a proxy circuit could be used to measure variations in circuit performance as conditions changed in the operating environment. There were a couple of recent presentations on margin sensors at two of the big EDA vendors' customer engineering forums that we’ll look at as well as another product with an upcoming presentation at DAC. Ma... » read more

DAC Panel Could Spark Fireworks


Panels can often become love fests. While a title may sound controversial, it turns out that everyone quickly finds that all the panelists agree on the major points. This is sometimes the result of how the panel was put together – the proposal came from one company, and they wanted to get their customers or clients onto the panel. They are unlikely to ask a major competitor to be part of the ... » read more

Revitalizing DAC


The 61st Design Automation Conference is just two months away and as I get closer to retirement, I know there will only be a few remaining for me. I entered the EDA industry in 1980, so have been involved with it for almost 45 years. Over that period, I have only missed a few. It is interesting how the conference has changed over the years. In the early days, DAC was only a conference, where... » read more

TSMC Uncorks A16 With Super Power Rail


TSMC showed off its forthcoming A16 process technology node, targeted for the second half of 2026, at its 30th North American Technology Symposium this week. As the foundry moves from nanometer to angstrom process numbering, the new nodes will be prefixed with an “A” designation (instead of “N”) and A16 is the first for TSMC. TSMC said that N2 is still tracking to a 2025 production s... » read more

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