Bespoke Silicon Rattles Chip Design Ecosystem


Bespoke silicon developers are shaking up relationships, priorities, and methodologies across the semiconductor industry, creating demand for skills that cross traditional boundaries, and driving new business models that leverage these enormous investments. Bespoke silicon designers today are a rare breed, capable of understanding the unique requirements of a specific domain, as well as a gr... » read more

IC Architectures Shift As OEMs Narrow Their Focus


Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are designed, what they're expected to do, and how quickly they're supposed to do it. In the past, tradeoffs between performance, power, and cost were defined mostly by large OEMs within the confines of an industry-wide scaling roadmap. Ch... » read more

EDA, IP Revenue Up 15%


EDA and IP revenues blasted off in Q3 of 2020 in every geography and every sector, despite a trade war, a pandemic, and slowdowns in the automotive and avionics sectors. Revenue grew to $2.95 billion, up 15% over the $2.57 billion in the same period in 2019, according to a just-released report from the Electronic System Design Alliance Market Statistic Services (MSS). The four-quarter moving... » read more

Service Revenue Growing With Chip Complexity


Rising complexity, new markets, and a shortage of in-house expertise are beginning to rekindle demand for services for the first time in nearly a decade. The semiconductor industry has been racing to design chips for a variety of new and existing applications, but they are facing challenges on a number of fronts: Leading-edge chips require new architectures due to a sharp reduction in s... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Deals Advanced Semiconductor Engineering was selected by zGlue as its strategic manufacturing partner. The ASE Group will make the zGlue Integrated Platform, which is said to enable customization for consumer and industrial IoT markets. The ZiP integrates hardware and software in a modular 3DIC-based platform. ASE will assemble zGlue-certified chiplets for connecting through zGlue Smart Fabric... » read more

Rise Of The Old Fab


Growth in the [getkc id="260" comment="Internet of Everything"], along with the beginning of a shift toward systems in package, are creating buzz in a rather unlikely place—established and well-worn process nodes where equipment is scarce, semi-functional, and difficult to maintain. In the past, moving to the next node was a sign of progress, leaving behind the trailing edge of designs to ... » read more

Appetite For Services Grows


Semiconductor service revenues have been growing for the past year, fueled by complex thermal and power issues at advanced nodes, the difficulty of integrating more and more IP blocks, and far more techniques, languages and methodologies that engineers need to learn to be productive in the finFET generation. The services business typically acts as a bridge between down and up cycles in the c... » read more

EDA Sales Strong Again


EDA and IP sales were robust again in Q1, up 7.5% to $1.877 billion compared with $1.746 billion in the same period in 2014, according to the EDA Consortium. On the upside, IP revenue rose 19.3% to $618.1 million; services revenue increased 6.8% to $104.4 million; and PCB and multi-chip module revenue increased 1.1% to $161.5 million. On the downside, CAE—the largest single category—... » read more

IP Market Booms At Advanced Nodes


As [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"] design and manufacturing costs rise, system OEMs are wringing as much of that increase as they can from ASIC vendors. The result is that engineering teams on the design and test side are being constrained by budgets at a time when complexity is rising and time-to-market pressures are increasing. At least one segment is benefiting from directly this. Budgetary... » read more