Introduction As the saying goes, it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Yet, among the fog of uncertainty, a rare prescient vision in the realm of technology stands out. In 2011, venture capital investor Marc Andreessen crafted an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “Why Software Is Eating The World.” Andreessen … Read more

Mastering AI is becoming increasingly vital in shaping economic, social, energy, military and geopolitical landscapes. Enabling the extensive implementation of advanced AI technologies across businesses, government entities and individual bodies is not only strategic but also imperative. Despite seven decades of mostly unsuccessful investigation, AI has experienced significant growth over the last 10 years, expanding … Read more

Prologue Peter was running late for two reasons. First, he encountered unexpected heavy traffic and arrived ten minutes late for a crucial meeting with a customer to run a compliance test of his new 6G phone design prototyped on FPGAs. This prototype’s success was pivotal, as it could secure a significant purchase order. Peter had … Read more

The ever-growing demand for longer battery life in mobile devices and energy savings in general have pushed power optimization to the top of designers’ concerns. While various techniques like multi-VT transistors and clock gating offer power savings at gate-level design, the real impact occurs at system level, where hardware and software collaborate. A key power savings … Read more

Khaled Maalej is founder and CEO of VSORA, a provider of high-performance silicon chips for GenerativeAI and L4/L5 autonomous driving (AD) applications based in France. Before founding VSORA in 2015, Maalej was CTO at DiBcom, a fabless semiconductor company that designed chipsets for low-power mobile TV and radio reception acquired by Parrot. He graduated from Ecole … Read more

The relentless pursuit for maximizing performance in semiconductor development is now matched by the crucial need to minimize energy consumption. Traditional simulation-based power analysis methods face insurmountable challenges to accurately capture complex designs activities in real-world scenarios. As the scale of modern SoC designs explodes, a new pre-silicon dynamic power analysis methodology is essential. This … Read more

2024 DVCon was very busy this year. Bernard Murphy and I were in attendance for SemiWiki, he has already written about it.  Multi die and chiplets was again a popular topic. Lauro Rizzatti, a consultant specializing in hardware-assisted verification, moderated an engaging panel, sponsored by Synopsys, focusing on the intricacies of verifying multi-die systems. The … Read more

GPU, the ubiquitous graphics processing unit, is arguably the most important computing technology today. It made AI processing possible but at an unsustainable cost, exacerbated by enormous power consumption. A revolution is underway in the software development world. The paradigm that ruled software engineering as originally conceived consists of a sequence of instructions executed on … Read more

After dominating the computing landscape since the mid-1940s, the CPU architecture got demoted. As long as the escalating demand for powerful data processing outpaced the requirements for high bandwidth data movement, CPUs delivered what was expected from them. The rise of big data feeding high-performance computing (HPC) tilted the balance in favor of massive data … Read more

When we last saw Luc Burgun’s name in the semiconductor industry, he was CEO and co-founder of EVE (Emulation and Verification Engineering), creator of the ZeBu (Zero Bugs) hardware emulator. EVE was acquired by Synopsys in 2012. After the acquisition, Luc moved out of EDA and became an investor. Join me as I catch up … Read more