Aeponyx: Optical Chips For Telecom


As the amount of data grows, so does interest in silicon photonics. There is no better way to move data than with light. It's faster, requires less energy, and generates less heat. The main trouble spots come in two places—packaging the light source with another chip, and the switching technology from optical to electrical and back to optical. While companies like Intel have been working o... » read more

Performance-IP: Less Memory Latency


The combination of more functionality on chips plus more contention for memories is forcing companies to look at different ways to improve performance. Just adding more processing power doesn't guarantee improved performance, and throwing more memory at a problem—either SRAM or multiple levels of cache—is expensive and not always faster. There are too many processors and too many request... » read more

Fractilia: Pattern Roughness Metrology


A new startup has emerged and unveiled a technology that addresses one of the bigger but less understood problems in advanced lithography--pattern roughness. The startup, called Fractilia, is a software-based metrology tool that analyzes the CD-SEM images of pattern roughness on a wafer. Fractilia, a self-funded startup, is led by Chris Mack and Ed Charrier. Mack, known as the gentleman sc... » read more

Sigasi: Cleaner VHDL And SystemVerilog


Hardware engineers always have looked at software tools and methodologies with a certain degree of envy. While the hardware side has embraced the discipline necessary to get products right prior to release, in large part because it's too expensive to fix an error in hardware, the tools and languages are generally clunkier and the methodologies are much more rigid. Like software, they have to in... » read more

SiFive: Low-Cost Custom Silicon


One of the lessons learned years ago in the open-source Linux world is that free software isn't always good enough. Consequently, being able to add commercial value around freeware can turn into a lucrative business. Red Hat Software, for example, has turned this approach into a thriving multi-billion-dollar business. But nothing comparable has ever succeeded in the SoC world. Enter SiFi... » read more

GMK: Rethinking The Audio Jack


The lowly audio jack, taken for granted since the days of the transistor radio, is getting a lot of attention these days. Apple thought so little of it, in fact, that it eliminated it altogether with its iPhone 7, choosing to run analog signals through the power cable rather than keeping a separate audio jack. Now GMK, a fabless semiconductor startup in Korea, is taking the reverse approach—r... » read more

MapD Makes GPUs First-Class Citizens


It’s now well known that with the latest innovations in parallel programming and GPU technology, graphics processing units (GPUs) can be harnessed today to deal with the enormous data sets regularly encountered in applications ranging from ADAS, artificial intelligence, and gaming to deep learning, scientific computation, and high-performance computing. But how exactly do you find what you... » read more

Getting The Jump On Analog/RF IP


When Magma Design was sold to Synopsys in 2012, then-president and COO Roy Jewell sat down with VC Lucio Lanza to figure out what to do next. As Jewell tells it, Lanza convinced him not to take another job. While it’s too early to tell if that was sage advice, it did trigger a search for a new business and a way of funding it. Jewell said that when Magma went looking for money, it raised $... » read more

Menta Embeds FPGA Programmability


What constitutes a startup can be a matter of the market segment you are going after and the type of product that you are building. Within [getkc id="7" kc_name="EDA"], we often think of the lifetime of a company being just a few years between when an opportunity is identified, to a product being built and getting the first few customers and then getting gobbled up by one of the big three. But ... » read more

Valtrix Pushes For Horizontal Verification Reuse


Some of the most significant advances are not the result of a single person or a single idea. They often don’t happen overnight, and are suggested by a change that slowly becomes pervasive enough to become a generalized solution. That is exactly what is happening right now in the area of functional verification. The tools and methodologies in place at the moment assumed designs typical of the... » read more

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