Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm advanced its progress toward an initial public offering, confidentially submitting a draft registration statement on Form F-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The size and price range for the proposed offering have yet to be determined. Graphene IDM Paragraf acquired Cardea Bio, a maker of graphene-based biocompatible chips. Cardea has developed a biosignal processing unit... » read more

Blog Review: May 3


Synopsys' Thomas Andersen considers the requirements of AI-optimized chips that are resulting in exploration of different memory configurations, different types of memory, and different types of processor technologies and software components. Cadence's Girish Vaidyanathan considers the role of hierarchy and partitioning in custom design and looks at how a virtual hierarchy allows layout desi... » read more

Startup Funding: April 2023


Packaging was a hot spot in April, with one of the largest rounds going to a middle-end-of-line advanced packaging company. A second packaging company also drew significant funding for its focus on wafer-level packaging for CMOS image sensors. Two packaging substrate manufacturers also saw investment. Two photoresist makers also drew sizeable rounds. Both they and the packaging companies are... » read more

TSMC Targets N2 Production For 2025


April ended with TSMC’s financial results for the 1st Quarter of 2023 reported on April 20, 2023, and their North American Technology Symposium was held on April 27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. TSMC’s N3 entered volume production in 4Q 2022 and TSMC’s N2 “nanosheet” technology is on schedule for production in 2025. TSMC’s CEO, C.C. Wei, said during the 1Q conference cal... » read more

EDA Posts Q4 2022 Revenue of $3.9B


The ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community, announced today in its latest Electronic Design Market Data (EDMD) report that the Electronic System Design (ESD) industry revenue increased 11.3% from $3.47 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021 to $3.86 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022. The four-quarter moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four, rose 12.6... » read more

AI Adoption Slow For Design Tools


A lot of excitement, and a fair amount of hype, surrounds what artificial intelligence (AI) can do for the EDA industry. But many challenges must be overcome before AI can start designing, verifying, and implementing chips for us. Should AI replace the algorithms in use today, or does it have a different role to play? At the end of the day, AI is a technique that has strengths and weaknesses... » read more

Can AI Write RTL?


Just a few months ago, generative AI was just a promise about what would be possible in the future. Today, nearly everyone with an ounce of curiosity has tried ChatGPT. Most people appear to be somewhat impressed with what it can do, but at the same time see the limitations that it has. As Dean Drako, founder of several companies, told me: "Recently, I needed to write a patent. I described t... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outlined its plan for a National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) to be created using a share of the $11 billion in funds from the CHIPS Act marked for research and development. While a large portion of the CHIPS Act investment is set to boost U.S. fabs and manufacturing capabilities, the NSTC aims to also support the design side, ... » read more

EDA Makes A Frenzied Push Into Machine Learning


Machine learning is becoming a competitive prerequisite for the EDA industry. Big chipmakers are endorsing and demanding it, and most EDA companies are deploying it for one or more steps in the design flow, with plans to add much more over time. In recent weeks, the three largest EDA vendors have made sweeping announcements about incorporating ML into their tools at their respective user eve... » read more

Design Challenges Of High-Speed Wireline Transmitters


By Samad Parekh and Noman Hai The need for higher bandwidth networking equipment as well as connectivity in the cloud and hyperscale data centers is driving the switch technology transition from 25T (terabytes) to 50T and soon to 100T. The industry has chosen Ethernet to drive the switch market, using 112G SerDes technology today and next generation architectures being designed to operate at... » read more

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