The Week In Review: Design


M&A Silvaco finalized its acquisition of SoC Solutions. The Georgia-based company was founded in 2000. Its team and portfolio of pre-configured IP subsystems and IoT/M2M IP will join Silvaco's IP group. Terms were not disclosed. Siemens PLM will acquire TASS International, a provider of simulation software, engineering and test services aimed primarily at the automotive industry. Based ... » read more

Executive Insight: Wally Rhines


Wally Rhines, president and CEO of [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor, a Siemens Business"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about industry consolidation, a shift in emphasis from chips to systems, and what the recent acquisition by Siemens will mean for Mentor. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: A year ago it looked as if the entire industry was going to b... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 30


Cadence's Meera Collier explains machine learning, unsupervised algorithms, and why Facebook's recently publicized AI chatbot conversation isn't as inscrutable as it sounds. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi considers recently proposed legislation which seeks to mitigate the risk of botnets commandeering IoT devices used in the U.S. government, including limiting the use of hard-coded passwords and ce... » read more

Integrated Photonics (Part 1)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the status of integrated photonics with Twan Korthorst, CEO for PhoeniX Software; Gilles Lamant, distinguished engineer for [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Bill De Vries, director of marketing for Lumerical Solutions; and Brett Attaway, director of EPDA solutions at AIM Photonics, SUNY Polytechnic Institute. What follows are excerpts of tha... » read more

System Bits: Aug. 29


Could video goggles, and a tiny implant cure blindness? Incredibly, the world of medical research is on the verge of curing blindness. Similar to cochlear implants for deaf people, Stanford University scientists and engineers are developing new devices to this end, including a bionic vision system based on photovoltaic implants, which is awaiting approval for human clinical trials in Europe. A... » read more

An Innovator’s Vision


I had the pleasure of talking with [getperson id="11764" comment="Lucio Lanza"], managing director of Lanza techVentures, when I was researching my article on design innovation earlier this month. One thing that sets successful business people apart is their ability to see patterns, to correctly identify how those patterns fit together and progress and, based on those, to know which way to evol... » read more

Are You Designing The Right Product?


Development and production of SoCs is becoming more and more complex and expensive. And rightfully so, the semiconductor industry spends billions of dollars on verification efforts. Verification is about checking the design behaves per its specification, a process that is very important and well understood. Still, something can go terribly wrong because having a verified SoC does not guarant... » read more

Avoiding Traffic Jams In SoC Design


While sitting in a traffic jam on the way to work, I realized that the sheer volume of vehicles on the road exceeds the capacity originally planned for by civil engineers, when highways first hit the drawing boards 50 or 60 years ago. It dawned on me that there is a parallel to today’s System-on-Chip design—engineers are struggling to close timing on the interconnect during the back-end pla... » read more

Tools To Design CNNs


Convolutional neural networks are becoming a mainstay in machine learning and artificial intelligence, allowing a network of distributed sensors to collect data and send them to a central brain for processing. This is a relatively simple idea in comparison to today's technology, and the idea of the [getkc id="261" kc_name="convolutional neural network"] has been around for some time. But bui... » read more

What’s New At Hot Chips


By Jeff Dorsch & Ed Sperling Machine learning, artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing took center stage at Hot Chips 2017 this week, a significant change from years past where the focus was on architectures that addressed improvements in speed and performance for standard compute problems. What is clear, given the focus of presentations, is that the bleeding edge of comput... » read more

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