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If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the last couple of weeks glued to the TV, watching the 2016 Olympics in Rio, cheering madly every time a favorite athlete was competing. In our household, the entire family gathers around our big-screen TV every evening, and as Olympic events are wont to be, most photo finishes are endlessly paused, still-forwarded, verdicts passed and debated. Time and again, I’m simply astounded…

https://youtu.be/lD8VFUNds7o

Monday: Labor Day.

Tuesday: CDNLive Boston. I report from last week's CDNLive Boston with a summary of some high spots of the day.

Wednesday: SiFive, a look at the fabless semiconductor company created by the creators...

The MIPI Alliance exists to standardize widely used interfaces in mobile, such as those to cameras, displays, sensors, and more. I think MIPI originally stood for mobile industry processor interface when it was created, but now it says that "MIPI is not...

Are you an advanced node layout or CAD engineer trying to find a methodology for routing designs in the Virtuoso platform? Interested to learn how to specify tracks for correct-by-construction designs using width spacing patterns (WSPs)? If you are not using the WSP Manager in the Virtuoso environment to create and modify your WSPs, now is the time to try it.

Who?

Istvan Novak - senior principal engineer at Oracle

Kevin Roselle - senior staff engineer at Qualcomm

Dale Becker – chief electronics packaging engineer at IBM

Stephen Scearce – senior manager of high-speed design at Cisco

Ken Willis - product engineering director of high-speed analysis products at Cadence

What?

Our experts got together and agreed on a set of kickoff topics. These are issues…

At CDNLive in India, Cadence's Hany Elhak discussed aging and self-heating, and how to analyze it.

All transistors age and all transistors have self-heating effects. However, aging wasn't really an issue until 28nm. 90nm transistors will last essentially...

Microsoft provided details of their HoloLens HPU at HotChips this week, revealing the use of 24 optimized Tensilica processors to speed up all the sensor processing by up to 200x. The media has taken notice as well with reports appearing across all of the popular sites.

What Microsoft did sounds pretty extreme; creating a processor to make it run their algorithms in fewer cycles so as to keep both the performance high…

I hope it isn't a surprise to anyone reading this blog that the share of a vehicle's cost that goes to electronics is increasing rapidly. I expect most readers participate in some way in the ecosystem that supplies the electronics, most of which is semiconductor...

In Game of Thrones, ravens are George RR Martin's way of getting information around faster than a horse, the email of his world. At UC Berkeley, Raven is a RISC-V processor, with an attached vector processing unit, aiming for extreme energy efficiency...

I had an exciting week in July here in Pittsburgh, PA with the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI.org). I was fortunate enough to be invited to do one of the keynotes at the Symposium, thanks to the co-chairs: University of Pittsburgh...

I think the person who has the strongest claim to putting the silicon in Silicon Valley is William Shockley. He was one of the three people, along with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, to invent the transistor in 1943, for which they subsequently won...

https://youtu.be/X-hVSQfbtFE

Searching for “automatic coverage maximization” results with ~16 million hits. Alas, this does not reflect 16 million solutions, rather it is an indication of the big interest in this topic, and the many attempts to automate the process of “getting full coverage, faster”. There are several tools available, performing smart coverage analysis and directing the tests to the less covered areas.

For…

At what has now become the Linley Mobile and Wearables Conference, Linley pointed out that wearables are growing at 38%.

However, there was a big caveat on Linley's slide, that this assumes "Apple releases a popular smart watch in 2017" followed by ...

MIPI DevCon 2016 – Mobile and Beyond

The word “beyond” may bring up thoughts of the new Star Trek Beyond movie, or for those of you who are fascinated by real space travel, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Maybe that’s why the first MIPI Alliance® Developer’s Conference will be held in, Mountain View, California, near the NASA Ames Research Center. The real lesson…

The keynote at CDNLive Bengaluru was given by Michal Siwiński. Since day 1 of CDNLive is verification and PCB, and day 2 is digital and analog implementation, almost nobody attends both days. So the keynote was repeated the second day by Vivek Mishra...

There is little doubt that Internet of Things has become the next big thing in business, in particular in semiconductor IP. The growing number of devices monitoring and adjusting our surroundings – lighting, temperature, sound volume and others has exploded in the recent years, and actually, so did the number of pins within an SoC that is needed to connect them all.

Also, the use cases for the new generation of…

SEMICON West runs a sort of award program called Best of the West. Companies submit products, six finalists are chosen, and a final Best of the West is selected. Since SEMICON covers such a wide range, the entries cover everything from wafer processing...

The post A Perspective on Perspec earlier this week introduced the idea of Perspec System Verifier, that if you have a fairly abstract model of the system at a very high level, you can automatically generate scenarios to verify high-level functionality...

The adoption and usage of advanced node technology (16nm and below) has been extraordinary over the last few years. However, along with the benefits in power and area, the new nodes also contain new challenges when it comes to properly determining the variation caused by the smaller geometries.  Much has been written about the proper ways to physically implement a FinFET design, but less has been written on the need for…

http://youtu.be/ZkZQAW6Gl7M

Monday: At SEMICON West the winner of the "Best of the West" award was Coventor. Take a look at their technology for virtual fabrication of wafers.

Tuesday: The keynote at CDNLive in Bengaluru was given by Michal...