EDA Suffering Funding Crisis


The EDA industry has been built on venture funding ever since its inception in the early eighties and it is no secret that the big three have relied on a steady stream of startup companies to provide some of the new ideas, to test out new technologies and expand the industry. While there is a lot of research and development that goes on inside the large companies, most of this is related to ... » read more

FinFET Ramp: Changing Market Dynamics?


Rolling out a new semiconductor technology always has its share of challenges, but it seems like the 14nm finFET process node is starting off with more than its share of delays and speculation. This week Intel revealed some of the details for its new microarchitecture, Broadwell, and their first product, the Intel Core M processor, to be manufactured using their second-generation finFET, 14... » read more

Executive Insight: Gideon Wertheizer


SE: From your standpoint, what’s the next big thing? Wertheizer: The industry was driven in the past few years by the structure the smartphone created. It looks like this area is about to grow. What’s changing is the integration of the smartphone with other applications. The smartphone is now a hub of entertainment and productivity with many devices connecting directly or indirectly to i... » read more

Executive Insight: Taher Madraswala


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Taher Madraswala, president of Open-Silicon, to talk about future challenges, opportunities and changes. What follows are excerpts of that interview. SE: What worries you most? Madraswala: What worries me at the industry-level is the growing effect that business constraints are having on product innovation. We’ve done a very good job of advancing ... » read more

Infrastructure, Then Integration


In any business and in any business segment, you have to start somewhere and then figure out what the likely end points will be and how to get there. It’s no different with the Internet of Things, except that the integration of different markets or applications is rather fuzzy at the moment. For example, it’s pretty easy to predict the possibilities for a car. It will likely move from co... » read more

Who Owns DAC?


In June I was chatting with an editor unfamiliar with DAC and he was wondering who owns the conference. It’s a fair question and I recall thinking I’d blog about it as part of my effort to boost understanding of DAC. After all, my goal is to let you glimpse behind the curtain and that means touching on the prosaic though very important issue of ownership. First, the basics. DAC is owne... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Deals Cadence won a deal with Airoha Technology, which will use Cadence’s RTL compiler and test tools to reduce power and test patterns in Bluetooth radio chips. Airoha is a fabless design house based in Taiwan. IP Cadence’s PHY and controller IP for PCI Express 3.0 have passed PCI-SIG certification tests. Numbers NXP reported its Q2 results. Revenue was $1.349 billion, up 14% comp... » read more

Changes In NAND Flash Market


Things are changing quickly in the NAND flash market. Newcomers are challenging long-time market leaders and shifting the lineup in this market. A survey of NAND flash vendors, conducted by DRAMeXchange, a Singapore market research firm, shows that in Q1 of this year Samsung was firmly in first place with $2.175 billion in revenues, followed by Toshiba with $1.548 billion and SanDisk with $1... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Sonics upgraded its on-chip network, improving support for memory subsystems as well as performance with guaranteed bandwidth allocation across multiple SOC flows. The company said these upgrades add support for the latest DDR4 and LPDDR4 memories, for the multi-threading capabilities of the Open Core Protocol interface, and while adding non-blocking concurrency technologies. Mentor G... » read more

EDA’s Hedge Plays


While 14/16nm process technologies with finFETs and double patterning have pushed complexity to new heights, the move to 10nm fundamentally will change a number of very basic elements of the design through manufacturing flow—and EDA vendors will be caught in the middle of having to make hard choices between foundries, processes, packaging approaches, and potentially which markets to serve. ... » read more

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