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

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

One Belt, One Road


China's so-called One Belt, One Road policy on global trade could have significant repercussions on semiconductors and IP if it succeeds. It's hardly a slam-dunk, and China has been vying for a larger position in the semiconductor industry for some time. But this is a completely different strategy because China is not attempting to go it alone this time. China has been rather quietly build... » read more

Portable Stimulus Status Report


The first release of the Portable Stimulus (PS) standard is slated for early next year. If it lives up to its promise, it could be the first new language and abstraction for verification in two decades. [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] uncorked the PS Early Adopter release at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June. The standard has been more than two years in the making by t... » read more

Design And Verification For An Era Of A Trillion Devices


Scared or excited? When I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation whether the one trillion devices that Softbank’s CEO Masa-san predicted least year at ARM TechCon was possible, I realized that a trillion may be the low end of the range. For me, the geeky excitement about the potential technological progress and how to architect the Internet of Things (IoT) gets balanced very fast with concern... » read more

Extracting Maximum Performance From Hardware


The Arm DS-5 Streamline performance analyzer provides system performance metrics, software tracing, and statistical profiling to help engineers get the most performance from hardware and find important bottlenecks in software. The Raspberry Pi 3 is one of the easiest systems for learning Streamline, and a quad-core Cortex-A53 also makes it a good target for learning Linux development. Many o... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 23


Cadence's Madhavi Rao asks whether India should have more fabs and the role government policy should play. Synopsys' Kapil Rajpal checks out the Serial Peripheral Interface, which is emerging as a popular choice in automotive applications, and various vendor specific flavors. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls explains inter-task communication and the basic mechanisms of how to pass data fr... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Connectivity M1 Limited of Singapore worked with Nokia to launch a nationwide narrowband Internet of Things network, targeting such applications as asset tracking, environmental monitoring, fleet management, and smart energy management for buildings. M1 hopes to boost the IoT ecosystem in Singapore with the new NB-IoT network. M&A DuPont has agreed to acquire Granular, a provider of digita... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Mentor acquired Valydate, provider of the VERA schematic integrity analysis tool. Founded in 2010, the Canadian company also offered signal and power integrity and static timing analysis services. Valydate's technology will be integrated with Mentor's Xpedition PCB design flow, though former Valydate CEO Michael Alam says it will continue to serve all EDA environments. Tools Aldec ... » read more

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