Methodology Vs. Problem-Solving


When I was 18, I bought a Vespa ’67: the famous Italian scooter. It was already very old then, totally beaten-up, but luckily I had a friend who owned an auto-repair shop, and he was kind enough to give me some access at night. For several weeks, I taught myself the art of metal bodywork, ending up with a beautiful metallic sky-blue ‘67 Vespa. God, I loved that machine! Then one day, ... » read more

Time To Watch China’s Equipment Efforts


For years, China has been developing its own semiconductor equipment and materials industry. The goal has been to reduce its dependence on foreign equipment and material vendors. Some China-based equipment vendors have made their presence felt. But overall, China’s equipment companies have barely made a dent in the market. Hardly anyone has been paying attention to China’s equipment ... » read more

Beyond-Line-Of-Sight Troposcatter Communications Primer


Though tropospheric scatter (troposcatter, or tropo) communications technology has existed since the 1950s and was used by the U.S. military from 1960 to 2002, this legacy technology is being revitalized in the wake of concerns around the reliability of tactical satellite communications (Satcom). For several decades, satellites were a reliable and secure method of communications that provided s... » read more

Integrating FPGA: Comparison Of Chiplets Vs. eFPGA


FPGA is widely popular in systems for its flexibility and adaptability. Increasingly, it is being used in high volume applications. As volumes grow, system designers can consider integration of the FPGA into an SoC to reduce cost, reduce power and/or improve performance. There are two options for integrating FPGA into an SoC: FPGA chiplets, which replace the power hungry SERDES/PHYs wit... » read more

It’s Eternal Spring For AI


The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had many ups and downs largely due to unrealistic expectations created by everyone involved including researchers, sponsors, developers, and even consumers. The “reemergence” of AI has lot to do with recent developments in supporting technologies and fields such as sensors, computing at macro and micro scales, communication networks and progre... » read more

Designer And IP Tracks Swell With Focus On ML, Security And Traditional EDA Methodologies


What are designers keenly interested in as the 57th Design Automation Conference (DAC) approaches? If you said machine learning (ML), you’d be only partially right. Based on designer and IP tracks submissions to the 57th edition of the venerable electronics-industry event, ML – how to design with it and optimize EDA tools and flows using it – is a hot topic. But so too are more traditi... » read more

Different Roles, Different Tools


A question often posed is: does the use of tools and processes change as you go from block level to subsystem and chip level and as you add software to your system on chip (SoC)? And of course, the answer is that things change a lot. The primary differences between designing individual blocks and designing a big chip are that blocks tend to be designed by individual engineers or very small g... » read more

‘Speak No Evil’ And SoC Problems


In the first of this blog trilogy, 'Are you listening,' I looked at not waiting for hindsight to be wise after the event, instead make use of what’s available and act ahead of time. In the second, 'See no evil,' we bizarrely saw how Sir Francis Drake, Admiral Nelson and Clint Eastwood all had something in common with Mizaru, one of the 3 wise monkeys (Kikazaru and Iwazaru being the other two)... » read more

Probing From Home


The current stay-at-home, work-from-home situation challenges the semiconductor industry in a way we have never seen before. Social distancing and remote work put operational procedures in place that can be difficult. In a previous post, we shared information on our virtual demos designed to help keep your semiconductor measurements running no matter where you are physically located. In this ... » read more

Adopting Yield Analysis Tools


DisplayLink is a fast growing medium-sized semiconductor fabless company from Cambridge UK. We began working with them a few years ago. We caught up with Shane Zhang, Head of Product Engineering to find out why he works with yieldHUB, the problems we solve and the features he likes most. Tell us about DisplayLink. Our operations team is based in Cambridge, UK. We work with teams, suppli... » read more

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