Rethinking Differentiation


Differentiation is becoming more difficult, more time-consuming, and in some cases much more expensive for chipmakers. The traditional metrics of faster performance, lower power and less area/cost, which are leftovers from the PC era, no longer are a guarantee of success despite the fact that they are still baseline metrics for many designs. Even new metrics such as ecosystem completeness, w... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A Tessera boosted its 2.5D and 3D-IC capabilities with the acquisition of Ziptronix. The $39 million cash purchase adds a low-temperature wafer bonding technology platform, which has been licensed to Sony for volume production of CMOS image sensors. Numbers Semico Research forecasts that the SoC market will approach $200 billion by 2019. According to its analysis, average die are... » read more

Getting Paid More


Consolidation is a regular news item in the semiconductor industry, and has been for years, but most of those deals have been relatively small. What's changing is the amount of consolidation involving big companies, fueled partly by a massive M&A fund in China, partly by an arms race in preparation for the IoE, and partly by the kind of thinking that if other companies are doing it, it's dan... » read more

Software Driving More Hardware Designs


The influence of software engineers is growing inside of chip and systems companies, reversing a decades-old trend of matching the software to the fastest or most power-efficient hardware and raising as-yet unanswered questions about what will change in SoC design. The shift is particularly evident in chips developed for high-volume markets such as mobile phones and tablets. It's also happen... » read more

Embedded Vision Becoming Ubiquitous


Embedded vision is becoming a topic of heated conversation thanks to the emergence of neural networks and their ability to make computer systems learn by example. Neural networks are a very different kind of processing element compared to the other kind of processors we have in the IP arsenal today in that they are not programmed in the same manner. They do not have a stream of instructions... » read more

The Trouble With Abstractions


Ask chip engineers about the value of abstractions and you're likely to get a spectrum of answers. While abstractions help in seeing the big picture on complex designs, the data for performance and power needs to be annotated from detailed information the engineering team may obtain later in the design flow. There is valuable information that can come from using abstractions correctly. And ... » read more

Electronics Butterfly Effect


Everyone has heard of the butterfly effect where a small change in a non-linear system can result in large difference in an outcome. For the past 40 years, the electronics industry has approximated a linear system, fed primarily by Moore’s Law. The incremental changes available at each new process node have led us to make incremental changes and improvements in many aspects of the design, its... » read more

What Is ‘Digital’?


I saw a LinkedIn article with this title a couple of weeks ago and was curious. Do we not know what digital is and do we need to question it? When I read the first line I was very surprised and somewhat confused. Ved Sen, the author said that, “Despite working in the digital space for years, now I was quite stumped a few weeks ago when I was asked to define it.” Why would digital be so d... » read more

Full AMS Design Flow For The IoT


By Nicolas Williams and Jeff Miller The pressure for a new generation of (analog/mixed-signal) AMS design capabilities has been accelerated by the sudden demand for Internet of Things (IoT). These inexpensive devices are used in an expanding array of scenarios on the edge of the network — thus the demand for an AMS design environment that is affordable and easy to use, but powerful enough ... » read more

The Times They Are A-Changin’


Let me start out by saying that I’m not a huge Bob Dylan fan. I’m an American that grew up in the 1960s, so it’s hard to not call some of Dylan’s catalog a soundtrack for your life. The song that I used to title this blog has some special relevance for me and eSilicon. Recently, we’ve heard a lot about changing times, and not-so-good times, when it comes to the worldwide economy and o... » read more

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