Breakfast Bytes Blogs

It's Martin Luther King Day on Monday. Cadence is off. Breakfast Bytes will not appear. And, as is traditional, I go completely off-topic the day before a break. In the past, a lot of novelty in eating came from going to restaurants. But I haven&...

This is another of my occasional update posts, where I revisit some older posts and update them with recent developments, but where there isn't really enough new information to justify a whole new blog post. Achronix Achronix last appeared in Bre...

On January 21 from 8:00am to 11:00am (PST), Cadence and Arm are presenting a joint CadenceCONNECT event Building Arm Compute with Cadence Digital Full Flow for Best PPA. Of course, it will be a virtual event, although there will be live Q&A after...

At IEDM in December, the opening keynote (technically "Plenary 1") was by Sri Samevadam of imec. His presentation was titled Towards Atomic Channels and Deconstructed Chips. He presented imec's view of the future of semiconductors going forward, both...

Are you a young person? Are you doing a PhD? Then you should know that Cadence is sponsoring the Young People Program (YPP) at DATE 2021. Not surprisingly, this is being driven by the European part of the Cadence Academic Network. Anton Klo...

https://youtu.be/gt4GiLtoJ4M Made at Castle Rock Park (camera Ziyue Zhang) Monday: DATE 2021: A Virtual Event in the First Week of February Tuesday: The Biggest Security Breach Ever Wednesday: Breakfast Nibbles 2021: Predictions for the Year, part 1 ...

The first part of my predictions for 2021 was two days ago, and the second part was yesterday. Process Everything in the first two posts has been driven by markets, not the basic technology. But the semiconductor industry's dynamo is the process ...

The first half of my predictions for 2021 was yesterday. You should probably start there if you ended up here without having read it. Automotive This seems like this is going to be the year that autonomous vehicles start to go somewhat mainstream. No...

It's 2021 finally. Although 2020 was actually a good year for the semiconductor industry, and for Cadence in particular, for many it was not (such as my daughter, son-in-law, and daughter-in-law, who all work in some way in food and beverage). So...

Over the Christmas break, the biggest security breach ever came to light. It is assumed to be instigated by a foreign entity. As you know, my security go-to guy is Bruce Schneier. See for example my posts RSA: Bruce Schneier or Encryption: Why B...

Design and Test Europe, normally known as just DATE, is coming up in the first week of February. Note that this is a month earlier than usual, the 1st to the 5th of February. The entire program is now available. Or the programme as the DATE website h...

T his is my end-of-year off-topic holiday post, traditional before a break or a holiday. Breakfast Bytes will be on hiatus until January 4. Let's hope 2021 is better than 2020, although for EDA, semiconductor, and electronics in general, 2020 was ...

Every year I make a few predictions about trends for the coming year. I will be doing 2021 sometime in January. In the meantime, let's look at how my 2020 predictions fared. Needless to say, I did not predict a pandemic, but that has had a surpri...

The annual RISC-V Summit (virtual, of course) was in early December. You can read my first report in my post The 2020 RISC-V Summit . The second day started with a keynote by Krste Asanovic, the lead of the team that defined the RISC-V ISA. Krste...

In my post The Start of the Arm Era I said that it feels like something significant is changing. There's something Arm-y in the air. Suddenly Arm is faster than all x86 processors except the highest end of AMD's line. But why now? The three b...

When I first came to the US, I started at VLSI Technology supporting a project called Bagpipe, mostly by getting the big Versatec plotter that VLSI had purchased to work at full speed and to spool jobs. Bagpipe was a chip for the future Mac...

https://youtu.be/ZcYIbkrHSv4 Made by my Christmas tree (camera Carey Guo) Monday: CadenceCONNECT: Mission Critical - Tom Beckley's Keynote Tuesday: How to Design Photonics If You Don't Have a PhD: iPronics and Ayar Labs Wednesday: Photonics: How...

It is not very well-known how involved Cadence is in establishing standards. Recently, in my post Cadence and Standards...and a New Codec for Your Phone , I wrote about this and about one particular standard, the new EVS (Enhanced Voice Services) code...

The second week of December was RISC-V week, the three-day RISC-V summit (or four if you are a member since Monday was "member day"). Tuesday opened with the keynotes being broadcast live. At least, that was the plan. The video platform pre...

Recently, Cadence held its fifth photonics summit, CadenceCONNECT: Photonics Contribution to High-Performance Computing. You can read my earlier posts: Photonic Integration—From Switching to Computing How to Design Photonics If You Don't Have ...

Last week was the virtual event CadenceCONNECT: Photonics Contribution to High-Performance Computing. The opening keynote was by Odile Liboiron-Ladouceur who leads a team working on photonics at McGill University in Montréa...

In October, we held the CadenceCONNECT: Mission Critical event, focused on aerospace and defense (A&D). Tom Beckley gave the opening keynote. By background, many of the senior people in A&D historically knew little about electronics, nev...

https://youtu.be/r7utPfsdcKk Made in front of my living room fire Monday: What Is a Capability? CAP, CHERI, and Morello Tuesday: Cadence and Standards...and a New Codec for Your Phone Wednesday: Photonic Integration — From Switching to Computin...

A few weeks ago, there was a webinar about designing 3D-ICs with Innovus Implementation. Although it was not the topic of the webinar, I should point out that if your die is more custom/analog, then you can also design 3D-ICs in the Virtuoso env...

Solving protein folding has been a challenge for at least 50 years. You probably know that proteins are made up of amino acids, of which there are just 20. They are linked into long chains. How proteins behave depends on how they fold up. For ex...