Before becoming professional engineers, most of us designed and built things as a hobby. It’s rare to find an engineer who jumped right into engineering school without at least some background of tinkering and experimenting. And, when we did those projects, we had full control. We could choose whatever part we wanted or needed. We didn’t have to deal with management, manufacturing, … Read More → "Who Chooses Components and Tools?"
Last week, I discussed the industry’s pursuit of Persistent Memory (PM) as a way to reduce mass storage (SSDs and HDDs) latency. (See “What Will Replace DRAM and NAND, and When?”) In that article, I mentioned some of the many candidate technologies in the PM Derby. Figure 1 is a graphic from Read More → "A Fab for All Reasons"
Perhaps when the most important problem is a nail, every solution starts to look like a hammer. With the ramping explosion in AI and machine learning, countless companies are trying to climb on the bandwagon, morphing and melding their existing technologies in an attempt to come up with a differentiated solution that will capture a meaningful share of this mind-boggling emerging opportunity. Everybody from EDA vendors to cloud data … Read More → "Achronix Accelerates eFPGA"
What do Douglas Adams, PCB design, DRAM for cryptocurrency, and the fourth Industrial Revolution have in common? This week’s episode of Amelia’s Weekly Fish Fry, of course! First up, Greg Roberts (EMA Design Automation) brings us the goods on EMA’s new ebook called “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to PCB Design”. Next, Mark Greenberg (Cadence Design Systems) and I chat about using DRAM4 for artificial … Read More → "The Spirit of 42"
Long, long ago, back when Richard Nixon was president of the United States of America, magnetic cores were the dominant computer memory technology. In fact, magnetic cores were essentially the only practical memory technology for two decades. Although we had hand-woven rope memory for ROM, only the Apollo space computers and the HP 9100 desktop calculator used it. My 1954 “Britannica Book of the Year”—a real book, … Read More → "What Will Replace DRAM and NAND, and When?"
There’s a new world order coming for the semiconductor industry, said A.B. Kahng. We’re racing to the end of Moore’s Law, and the race will now be won by sheer capex (capital expenditures) and size. Kahng, Professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego, was speaking at the < … Read More → "Racing to the End of Moore’s Law: The New World Semiconductor Order"
