I attended the 48th Design Automation Conference in San Diego this past week and I came away from the conference with several main thoughts:

EDA tool vendors continue to enhance their products by listening to their customers and acting on those inputs.
There [...]

At the just concluded Semico Summit 2011 conference, Sandeep Vij, President and CEO of MIPS Technologies made some very interesting observations regarding Consumer electronics applications and their use of memory resources.
We all know that the feature sets and functionality of devices aimed at Consumer applications have been increasing over the last 3-4 years. This is [...]

Semico Research Corp. was privileged to have the CEO of Xilinx Corporation, Moshe Gavrielov, deliver a presentation on developments in the Programmable Logic market at our just concluded Semico Summit 2011 conference.
Moshe made some very interesting points that are not necessarily always connected to the programmable logic market:

Today, FPGA companies [...]

The 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) market has seen great innovation in the products it offers to System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers over the last ten years. If any market segment in the semiconductor industry typifies the intense evolutionary pressures the entire electronics market has undergone, it is the 3rd Party SIP market.
Most of [...]

On Thursday, the 10th of June, Synopsys announced its intention to acquire Virage Logic for $315M ($289M after accounting for cash in Virage’s possession). The acquisition is expected to close around late October of this year.
This transaction will provide Synopsys with many diverse types of SIP such as Memory cells (both volatile and non volatile), [...]

Intel gave an in-depth look at their Moorestown platform aimed at Smartphone designs to selected analysts on Monday the 4th of May. My colleague, Tony Massimini, is dealing with the particulars of Moorestown as a platform in a separate Semico Spin article. My article is going to deal with looking at the Moorestown architecture and [...]

On 7/27/09 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco, ARM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, IBM, Samsung Electronics and Synopsys announced an agreement to establish a comprehensive technology enablement solution for SoC designs targeted at the mobile internet space specifically for the 32nm and 28nm process geometries.
While collaborations and partnerships between different semiconductor companies and [...]