Fewer Engineers Means Fewer Weapons Designs


By Ed Sperling Uncle Sam wants you—but not on the battlefield. The diminished pool of qualified engineering and science graduates is having a major impact on the defense market. There simply are too few trained engineers to design complex systems for the military at the rate they’re needed, creating a huge hole in a system that has been humming along for the better part of a century. And ... » read more

IP Consolidation Improves Reliability


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As individual blocks of IP in an IC design grow to more than 1 million gates, making sure each block functions reliably and interfaces with the system properly is a make-or-break scenario for many companies. For one thing, getting it right is absolutely critical as the semiconductor industry reaches its maturity point with margins harder to reach. Coupled with an ind... » read more

Not Everyone Feels The Pinch


By Ed Sperling In the midst of the longest and deepest downturn since the invention of the transistor, not everyone is doing badly. In fact, there are some bright spots across the electronics industry that seem to defy gravity, so to speak. In particular, design tools are doing well. When the industry is down, they’re typically down less because, as any successful executive in technolog... » read more

Where Is The Real Value?


If customers aren’t willing to pay for EDA or ESL tools, then something is clearly missing from the equation. It’s not that there isn’t value in the tools. Clearly, you can’t get the job of creating a system on chip done without them. But the real value has shifted.   These shifts have occurred at various points throughout the history of semiconductors. The big question is whether ... » read more

Moving Up The Food Chain


By Ed Sperling It used to be considered axiomatic that chip companies would be rewarded for spectacular technology, reflected in the market value of their components and in their stock price. But with stock prices routinely getting hammered even before the downturn, many companies have begun to re-think their mission. National Semiconductor, for one, is looking at creating modules rather than... » read more

Outsourcing Creeps Down Into Systems


Offshoring started out as a less-expensive way of developing enterprise applications, but outsourced software development is beginning to move much deeper into the system-level design world. So far, development has evolved from just productivity applications to embedded software. Even large-scale system design is being outsourced. The next step is to outsource pieces of system-level designs, s... » read more

Vectors of Change


Downturns have a way of changing things forever—sort of like the earthquake of 1812, which permanently re-routed the Mississippi River in three places. And while the common thinking is that things will go back to where they were before, they never do.   For one thing, the trend isn’t just smaller, faster, cheaper. It’s also shorter development cycles. Incredibly complex chips now tak... » read more

SOI Goes Mainstream


By Ed Sperling The crossover for system on insulator (SOI) versus bulk CMOS was supposed to happen at the 22nm, but that was before software developers ran into problems programming multicore chips. For years, SOI was considered the high-performance cousin of CMOS—more expensive, more difficult to manufacture and unnecessary for most applications. It is the heart of the Cell processor, ... » read more

Special Report: Semiconductor Road Map Survey


By Ed Sperling The upcoming semiconductor industry road map, which sets up the industry’s strategy and identifies trends for the next 15 years, is filled with three very interesting shifts and gaps. The road map, which will be formally unveiled next month, consists of findings gleaned from all the top chip companies. Juan-Antonio Carballo, a partner at IBM Venture Capital Group who spea... » read more

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