Test Connections Clean Up With Real-Time Maintenance


Test facilities are beginning to implement real-time maintenance, rather than scheduled maintenance, to reduce manufacturing costs and boost product yield. Adaptive cleaning of probe needles and test sockets can extend equipment lifetimes and reduce yield excursions. The same is true for load board repair, which is moving toward predictive maintenance. But this change is much more complicate... » read more

Industry Transformations In 2021 And Beyond


Last December, the name of my predictions blog summarized my view crisply, which is that "applications, ecosystems and system complexity will be key verification drivers for 2020." Slam dunk on these. Application domains significantly impacted verification aspects in 2020. Who would have thought that Facebook and AWS would be among the keynotes at our user conference, speaking about how thei... » read more

AI Signals A New Change Of Perspective


A very long time ago, I was a student at MIT, programming with card decks in APL on IBM mainframes and studying AI in a class from Patrick Winston (who took over MIT’s AI lab from the legendary Marvin Minsky). I kept the text book as a reminder of where the world would go. Over four titanic shifts, mainframes/card decks became VAX/VT100, thence to IBM PCs and PC clients tied by Ethernet to co... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 17


Mentor's Puneet Sinha identifies the key challenges, along with cost reduction and optimization opportunities, that come with using electric powertrains in autonomous vehicles. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi examines the impact of limited cellular networks on autonomous cars, and new communications protocols that could address coverage gaps. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as Lucian Shifren o... » read more

Design Chains Will Drive The Top 5 EDA Trends In 2018


In my prediction piece last year, I made seven trend predictions. Looking back, I did very well compared to what actually happened. For 2018, I am cutting it down to five trends that will impact EDA, but in my mind a lot of the trends will be driven by the ever-evolving ecosystem of design chains from IP though semiconductor to systems and to OEMs. While HBO’s 'Game of Thrones' comes to a con... » read more

Five Automotive Megatrends


We see the term 'new mobility' becoming a catch-all for everything happening in connected, autonomous, electric vehicle development. It’s too broad a term to describe the future, we need to drill down a level. We have to look beyond automotive today, see where industry technology convergence is taking us, and identify the megatrends. Here at Mentor Automotive, we have identified five: Connect... » read more

Follow The Design Activity


Everyone seems to be on a low-power kick, from the ASIC/ASSP world to the growing market of low-power embedded processors and SoCs. But what do the actual numbers tell us about the future trends for such low-power designs? One way to answer that question is to look at the result of architectural tradeoff studies currently being performed by chip designers. (See chart below) A causal glance a... » read more