Semiconductor 101: New Video

For several years now, I have given a presentation that started off under the name EDA 101 but has now become more accurately titled Semiconductor 101. Originally, I created this for internal consumption at Cadence and it was very well received. One person came up to me and said:

I've been at Cadence for nearly two years, sat through lots of quarterly communication meetings, but this is the first time I had any understanding of what we do.

It was not a surprise to me that people in organizations like HR and legal really appreciated it. More of a surprise was how many people in engineering and other parts of the company said that they learned a lot. If you are head-down in the trenches working on accelerating matrix algorithms for circuit simulation, I guess you don't get to look too much above the parapet and see the rest of the ecosystem of designers, fabs, and end-markets.

It turns out that we have a lot of customers who are attempting to begin doing their own chip designs from a standing start. Not the semiconductor companies, in general, but some system companies and, especially, aerospace and defense (A&D). Because of Covid I've been doing these presentations by Zoom, but finally I stepped into the studio and did an updated version of the video to be shared more widely.

One critique I received from someone who reviewed the video was that I never talked about what silicon was. I didn't re-record this edition of the video, but I added a new slide for next time about how the presentation is really about how we go from sand, silicon, the most common element in the world, to high-value electronics. Here's the slide:

And here's the video:

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