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The Economist on Silicon Supremacy

By Paul McLellan | 18 Dec 2018

A couple of weeks ago, the cover story of The Economist was Chip Wars: China, America and silicon supremacy . For the last few years it has been the biggest story in the semiconductor industry. You may already know the incredible fact that the value o...

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China | The Economist
CES Preview

By Paul McLellan | 17 Dec 2018

It's nearly January so it is nearly the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which takes place the first full working week of the year, so this year it starts on the evening of 7th, with an opening keynote (this year from LG, taking over from ...

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hifi 5 | vison q6 | dna 100 | Consumer Electronics Show | CES | Tensilica
Sunday Brunch Video for 16th December 2018

By Paul McLellan | 16 Dec 2018

https://youtu.be/izP9iUskcXQ Made at the Cadence Marketing Holiday Party (camera Sean) Monday: RISC-V: Real Products in Volume Tuesday: IEDM: All About Interconnect Wednesday: The Conway Disappearance Effect Thursday: Automotive Summit: The Road...

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automotive | risc-v | lidar | radar | vision | lynn conway | IEDM
Automotive Sensors: Cameras, Lidar, Radar, Thermal

By Paul McLellan | 14 Dec 2018

Yesterday I wrote a sort of overview of the Cadence Automotive Summit that took place in November, in the post Automotive Summit: The Road to an Autonomous Future . Today, the focus in on a key part of automating driving, namely sensors. One of the fi...

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automotive | embedded vision | lidar | radar | ISO 26262 | automotive summit
Breakfast Buffet for November 2018

By Paul McLellan | 13 Dec 2018

https://youtu.be/SxGTX1reCVw The three highlighted posts for November were: Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights...and Photonics, the Silicon Festival of Light Inside Google's TPU Mechanical, Thermal, EMI, SI, PI: PCB Design Needs Them All Sig...

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breakfast buffet | tpu | google | photonics | PCB design
Automotive Summit: The Road to an Autonomous Future

By Paul McLellan | 13 Dec 2018

Before Thanksgiving, Cadence held an Automotive Summit. I was going to dive into some of the detailed material presented, but it occurred to me that it might be a good time to step back and take a look at where we are in the industry as a whole. I&#3...

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automotive | functional safety | lidar | radar | camera | ISO 26262
The Conway Disappearance Effect

By Paul McLellan | 12 Dec 2018

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Lynn Conway sent me a link to an article that she'd written for the October edition of IEEE Computer, The Disappeared: Beyond Winning and Losing . Mead & Conway When I interviewed Rob Rutenbar when he received last y...

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mead and conway | lynn conway
IEDM: All About Interconnect

By Paul McLellan | 11 Dec 2018

The first week of December means it is IEDM, the International Electron Devices Meeting. This meeting pre-dates the integrated circuit and nearly pre-dates the transistor, so "electron devices" had a different meaning. In recent decades, th...

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IBM | Samsung | transistor | cfaed | tuv dresden | IEDM
RISC-V: Real Products in Volume

By Paul McLellan | 10 Dec 2018

I titled my preview of the RISC-V Summit RISC-V Summit Preview: Pascal or Linux? since it is clear that RISC-V is really the only game in town inside academia, but it still hasn't conquered the commercial world. So it's already Pasc...

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Western Digital | risc-v | NXP | fadu | vega | Qualcomm | sifive
Sunday Brunch Video for 9th December 2018

By Paul McLellan | 9 Dec 2018

https://youtu.be/M_d-K4yE_n4 Made on Cadence pathways (camera Sean) Monday: ICCAD and Open-Source CAD Tuesday: Clayton Christensen on the Prosperity Paradox Wednesday: Benedict's Christmas Present...ation: The End of the Beginning Thursday: Semic...

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The Mother of All Demos

By Paul McLellan | 7 Dec 2018

It is the 50th Anniversary on Sunday of a demo that took place on December 9th 1968. It would go on to become known as "The Mother of All Demos" because it changed people's conception of what computers could do and set the agenda for mu...

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stanford research institute | doug engelbart | SRI | mother of all demos
Semiconductor 2018: Up and to the Right...But Memory Way Up

By Paul McLellan | 6 Dec 2018

I was at a meeting of the ESD Alliance (probably still called EDAC back then) when someone memorably described the EDA industry as being like a water skier being towed behind the semiconductor industry speedboat. As long as the speedboat was going fa...

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Intel | Memory | Micron | NVIDIA | SanDisk | Samsung | EDA | broadcom | Toshiba | ic insights | Semiconductor | Qualcomm | SK Hynix
Benedict's Christmas Present...ation: The End of the Beginning

By Paul McLellan | 5 Dec 2018

Every year Benedict Evans of a16z does a "big" presentation on the future of mobile and digital media. I put the word "big" in quotes because the other annual take on the internet is Mary Meeker's Internet Trends. Here is the 2018 version which comes...

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benedict evans | Internet | a16z
Clayton Christensen on the Prosperity Paradox

By Paul McLellan | 4 Dec 2018

Probably my favorite business book ever is Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. It is not just important, a book that anyone involved in management and strategy should read, it is also wonderfully written. I don't think I can go...

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clayton christensen | prosperity paradox | innovator's dilemma
ICCAD and Open-Source CAD

By Paul McLellan | 3 Dec 2018

Every year in November it is ICCAD, officially the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design. This year was the 37th, presumably meaning that the first one was in 1981. This year it was held in San Diego. I wasn't able to go, but several ...

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woset | ICCAD | open source
Sunday Brunch Video for 2nd December 2018

By Paul McLellan | 2 Dec 2018

https://youtu.be/0vF465hv62k Made in Cadence EBC (camera Sean) Monday: Neural Nets Hit the Roofline—Memory for AI Tuesday: Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer? Wednesday: Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights...and Photonics, the Silicon Festival o...

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"GDPR Is an Enormous Regulatory Own Goal"

By Paul McLellan | 30 Nov 2018

During the summer I was on Twitter when I saw a tweet from Benedict Evans. He is an Englishman (yeah!) who Andreessen-Horowitz (usually just called a16z) brought over to the US to be a partner. The tweet said that "it was a gift to Google and Fa...

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dmca | Europe | YouTube | gdpr | venture capital
An Illuminating Chat with Lumerical's CTO

By Paul McLellan | 29 Nov 2018

During the recent photonics summit, I sat down with James Pond, the CTO of Lumerical along with Rich Goldman who is doing their marketing. At CDNLive in Munich earlier in the year I got a brief demo of the Lumerical software. Their main products prov...

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interconnect | Lumerical | photonics
Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights...and Photonics, the Silicon Festival of Light

By Paul McLellan | 28 Nov 2018

November 7 is the big day in Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, as it symbolizes the victory of light over darkness, and of knowledge over ignorance. All of which made it a perfect day to have Cadence's Silicon Photonics Summit, and celebrate ...

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curvycore | photonics | silicon-photonics
Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?

By Paul McLellan | 27 Nov 2018

One subject that regularly gets some traction in the news is whether cellphones cause brain cancer. Every so often a jury awards damages and the press makes a big deal about it, but usually it turns out mostly to be that a sympathetic plaintiff like ...

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stastical significance | cellphones | significance | p-hacking | mobile | brain cancer | p-value
Neural Nets Hit the Roofline—Memory for AI

By Paul McLellan | 26 Nov 2018

At the recent Linley Processor Conference, there were two interesting presentations on the memory demands of AI processors. The two presentations were: Steven Woo of Rambus on Memory Systems for AI and Leading-Edge Applications. Ryan Baxter of Micro...

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artificial intelligence | Memory | deep learning | DRAM | roofline | AI
Sunday Brunch Video for 25th November 2018

By Paul McLellan | 25 Nov 2018

https://youtu.be/yroiWVJA8vs Made on top of Haleakala, Maui (camera Carey Guo) Monday: Inside Google's TPU Tuesday: Google TPU Software Wednesday: The Fermi Paradox Thursday: No post Friday: No post www.breakfastby...

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The Fermi Paradox

By Paul McLellan | 21 Nov 2018

It's the day before Thanksgiving. Breakfast Bytes will be dark Thursday and Friday. But today, the day before a break, I write about something that has little (okay, no) connection to semiconductors and EDA. I thought today I'd write about the Fermi ...

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offtopic | fermi paradox | drake equation
Google TPU Software

By Paul McLellan | 20 Nov 2018

In yesterday's post I gave the details of the TPU hardware from Cliff Young's keynote on the second day of the recent Linley Processor Conference. Today, I'll look at what Cliff said about software and co-design, creating both the hardwar...

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codesign | tpu | google | Linley
Inside Google's TPU

By Paul McLellan | 19 Nov 2018

At the Linley Fall Processor Conference recently, the keynote on the second day was by Cliff Young of Google titled Codesign in Google TPUs: Inference, Training, Performance, and Scalability. The TPU is Google's Tensor Processing Unit. It is actually...

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tpu | google | TensorFlow | machine learning

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