Benefits Of Being A B-Corp. In The Tech Industry


Becoming a Certified B Corporation comes with many benefits, most of them extending beyond the walls of the company and into the hands of employees, community members, and industry partners. The designation makes the meticulous and rigorous process to certification well worth the endeavor. In 2021, Brewer Science announced that it’s the first company in the semiconductor industry to become... » read more

Education Vs. Training


While writing my recent articles on the subject of training, a number of people pointed out that training and education are not the same thing. In a very simple sense, training is defined to be learning a skill or behavior that enables you to 'do' something, whereas education is the acquisition of knowledge from study or training. These definitions leave me cold and, in my mind, miss a very ... » read more

New Approaches For Processor Architectures


Processor vendors are starting to emphasize microarchitectural improvements and data movement over process node scaling, setting the stage for much bigger performance gains in devices that narrowly target what end users are trying to accomplish. The changes are a recognition that domain specificity, and the ability to adjust or adapt designs to unique workloads, are now the best way to impro... » read more

What Is Intern Reading Club?


As the summer winds down, interns are busy completing their assigned projects and preparing their end of summer presentations. These presentations have been a rite of passage for interns on the Pointwise team for many years and gives each intern a chance to show off what they learned and accomplished. And the rest of the team gets to hear all the details of what they've been working on. Anothe... » read more

Will PAYGO Shake Up How We Pay for Chips?


System builders are used to buying integrated circuits on a simple transactional basis — the chip has a price, and that’s what you pay. But some application spaces may have a wide variety of capabilities that need hardware support, and each feature may not be used for every instance. Traditionally, one would design different chips for different feature mixes and price points. But a new p... » read more

Designing Chips In A ‘Lawless’ Industry


The guideposts for designing chips are disappearing or becoming less relevant. While engineers today have many more options for customizing a design, they have little direction about what works best for specific applications or what the return on investment will be for those efforts. For chip architects, this is proving to be an embarrassment of riches. However, that design freedom comes wit... » read more

Rethink, Not Replicate


We should start to call COVID the Great Disrupter. It caused many things to change, ranging from how the industry has been tackling education, to supply chains, the ability to find products in stores, and the pricing and availability of materials, workers, and office space. I can't see anyone fully trusting just-in-time supply chains anymore, even though they sometimes provided financial advant... » read more

Challenges For New AI Processor Architectures


Investment money is flooding into the development of new AI processors for the data center, but the problems here are unique, the results are unpredictable, and the competition has deep pockets and very sticky products. The biggest issue may be insufficient data about the end market. When designing a new AI processor, every design team has to answer one fundamental question — how much flex... » read more

Behind The Intel-GlobalFoundries Rumor


A Wall Street Journal report that Intel is looking to buy GlobalFoundries has sparked discussions across the industry. But what exactly this would mean, and why now versus a couple years ago, needs some context. There are layers upon layers of irony behind this would-be deal, and it dates back decades to some rather famous encounters. Consider former AMD CEO Jerry Sanders' 1991 comment that ... » read more

EDA, IP Numbers In Record Territory


EDA and semiconductor IP revenue soared to a new high, up 17% worldwide in Q1 compared to the same period in 2020, with revenue in China surging 73%, according to new data from SEMI's Electronic System Design Alliance. For many financial reports outside of semiconductors, strong growth numbers can be misleading because they reflect comparatively weak earnings stemming from pandemic-related s... » read more

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