Degrees Of Freedom For Innovation


I have been involved in several startups during my career, both true startups and startup ventures within a large EDA company. While they both demand innovative solutions, they have a very different goal and structures. When researching my story about innovation within EDA (yet to be published), I expected to receive a lot of large company bashing. While some pointed to sales strategies that... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Analog Devices acquired Flex Logix's technology assets, along with its technical team. Semiconductor global sales increased 23% in Q3 2024 $166B, up almost 11% versus the same period in 2023, according to SIA. Notable regional year-to-year sales in September: Americas up 46%, China up 23%, Europe down 8%. Fig.1: Worldwide Semiconductor Revenues, year-to-year % change. Source: Semiconduc... » read more

Automotive OEMs Focus On SDVs, Zonal Architectures


Giant automotive OEMs are re-evaluating how quickly to move to advanced technologies and software-driven designs amid crushing financial pressure from low-cost EVs developed in other markets such as China. U.S., European, and Japanese OEMs have been struggling for the past half-decade or so to figure out which is the best approach to developing EVs, undergoing multiple shifts in both hardwar... » read more

AI Drives IC Design Shifts At The Edge


The increasing adoption of AI in edge devices, coupled with a growing demand for new features, is forcing chipmakers to rethink when and where data gets processed, what kind of processors to use, and how to build enough flexibility into systems to span multiple markets. Unlike in the cloud, where the solution generally involves nearly unlimited resources, computing at the edge has sharp cons... » read more

Batteries Look Beyond Lithium


Lithium batteries dominate today’s rechargeable battery market, and while they have been wildly successful, challenges with lithium have spurred research into alternative chemistries that can improve on some of lithium’s downsides and still keep as many of the upsides as possible. So far, none of the alternative batteries has seen commercial success, but several variants have moved beyon... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 6


Cadence's Satish Kumar C explores how the Deferrable Memory Write transaction type in PCIe and CXL can improve latency, efficiency, and performance by delaying certain memory write operations during system bus congestion or until other priority tasks are complete and highlights implementation and verification challenges. Synopsys' Daryl Seitzer and Rahul Thukral point to magnetoresistive RAM... » read more

EMEA Investments Driving Technology Specialization


Government programs across Europe and the UK are seeing a surge of investments in leading edge technology, materials, and packaging. Industry and academia are coalescing around specialty areas, drawing on established relationships to foster innovation and fill gaps in regional supply chains while also maintaining international bonds. Government initiatives also are picking up in Israel, Saudi A... » read more

HW and SW Architecture Approaches For Running AI Models


How best to run AI inference models is a current topic of much debate as a wide breadth of systems companies look to add AI to a variety of systems, spurring both hardware innovation and the need to revamp models. Hardware developers are making progress with AI accelerators and SoCs. But on the model side, questions abound about whether the answer might come from revisiting older, less compl... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 30


Synopsys' Frank Schirrmeister argues that hardware-assisted verification techniques like emulation and prototyping are essential to help engineers improve design behavior to manage complexity and ensure systems function seamlessly in real-world applications. Siemens’ Stephen V. Chavez finds that ultra high-density interconnect (UHDI) has changed the design and production of PCBs to enable ... » read more

New Approaches To Power Decoupling


Decoupling capacitors have long been an important aspect of maintaining a clean power source for integrated circuits, but with noise caused by rising clock frequencies, multiple power domains, and various types of advanced packaging, new approaches are needed. Power is a much more important factor than it used to be, especially in the era of AI. “Doing an AI search consumes 10X the power t... » read more

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