From the Show Floor

Today while eating lunch at a table that was way too weighted towards members of the press and not enough actual industry people I had a discussion with the founder of a start up that uses IP blocks to create video ASIC designs.

He's spent a career in the video side of the semiconductor industry and was attending the show to get a sense of what competitors were doing and to do some networking. But in spite of his affliliation -- his career, his own company -- he was not as hot on the semiconductor space as he was on YouTube.  Everyone I spoke to at The Microprocessor Forum this week seemed to have something to say about Google's acquisition of the video hosting web company for $1.65 billion -- a company that no one had heard of a year ago.

Indeed, it was a big news week, with...Read More

You can take the engineer out of the competitive environment, but it's clear you can't take the competition out of the engineer. Or can you?

In a group known for sharing ideas in the name of science, the Microprocessor Forum had some rather odd backhanded commentary for those listening closely to the rather evenly spaced repartee. It also had some surprising revelations about cooperation.

It's no secret that many of the companies presenting at the conference share some of the same issues, whether it's the x86 architecture used by both Intel and AMD, Intel's Opteron, IBM's POWER and Fujitsu and Sun's SPARC. They all tend to run hot or have performance scaling issues-one is typically dependent on the other. In addition, they all have the same t...Read More

It's not quite MySpace, but it could offer a new venue for developers who want to connect and perhaps even collaborate.

During one of the briefing sessions at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) this week, some folks in marketing-style (i.e. glittery) bunny people suits came through the room, throwing out little Intel bunny people doll key chains.

It’s the first time in a while that I’ve seen those bunny people dolls and they always remind me of a former colleague of mine in a previous job, Andy Santoni,  who covered Intel when we both worked at Infoworld during the boom times, and whose office was virtually infested with the Intel bunny people dolls.

The bunny people dolls, according to this site, were created in 1997 a...Read More

After a major reorganization and more than a year of nipping at the heels of its much smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices, this fall’s Intel Developer Forum might have been host to nothing more than a giant hangover of despair.

But for the most part Intel seemed re-energized, and I saw no evidence of anyone moping around about colleagues who had been victims of the company’s recent workforce reductions [http://www.edn.com/article/CA6368854.html] that totaled about 10 percent.

Rather, executives were abuzz about new opportunities for big data center growth, driven by Web 2.0 and Software as a Service (SaaS). That certainly seems to be a tide that could raise all the boats in the ha...Read More

I woke this morning to voicemails from home warning me about today's terrorist news. Great.

At the NI Week today, the topic of discussion wasn't Dean Kamen's moving keynote, instead it was how we were all going to get home.

If you are flying today, get to the airport early. Some airlines are being stricter than others, forcing passengers to check laptops and cell phones along with all baggage, while others are sticking to the Department of Homeland Security's "no liquid" rule, effective immediately.

The obvious items under no liquids are shampoo, conditioner, gel, drinks, shaving cream, etc. But the not so obvious ones, include mascara, hand cream and lip balm, are being taken away here at the Austin airport's security gates. Fortunately, I pa...Read More

So Tuesday, NI talked about its “long tail” market, a sort of downward slope image that shows how the company isn’t dependent on a few customers with deep pockets but is instead serving a much broader audience with its more than 25,000 customers. During this morning’s keynote, NI focused on uses of its technology to make the world a better place.

Besides an Xbox example, which keynote presenter Senior VP of R&D Tim Dehne admitted was self indulgent, NI made some astounding presentations, particularly its closing demo with OptiMedia. OptiMedia has used LabVIEW to develop a technology called Pascal, which took an optical medical procedure that the company cofounder Mike Miltberger described as once being spread over days and equivalent to having a “soldering iron stuck in the eye” and reduced it to a five minute procedure that some ...Read More

“Well, what are you doing in Texas, ma’am?” was how I was greeted at the airport on Monday evening. I asked some friendly local to point me to a cab and his response was to strike up a conversation about why I’m in Austin and where I came from. New York is where I came from and I’m here for NI Week, I responded to this Texan gentleman who made the effort of walking me to the cab station. “Say hello to Dr. T for me,” he said as he headed back into the airport.
I hop in the car and find another friendly local: the cab driver. Cabbie, as I’ll call him in this blog, once worked for Apple, indeed he worked for Apple when NI was working on its first LabVIEW interface. We didn’t get into what changed in his career over the last 20 years, but we did get to talk about National Instruments and President, CEO and cofounder Dr. Jam...Read More

In the nine years that I’ve been following the EDA industry, I have to admit that I am always just a bit surprised at the tenacity and audacity of certain cogs in the EDA marketing/public relations wheel that on occasion make wild claims that, at times, have turned out not to be true. That said, I want to make one thing clear: We are not in a DFM crisis. An EDA user (users, by the way, are the best source for factual information about EDA tools) from a large Japanese semiconductor company told me directly that there is no crisis, we are merely on the evolutionary technology path that this industry has always and will always follow. So calm down with the doom and gloom messaging. This industry has ebbs and flows – this is not new information. Will all chip design come to a grinding halt if DFM tools are not used when they are needed? Maybe it will be more difficult, b...Read More

I have to say, this year’s show was a little disappointing. While numbers of attendees and exhibitors were up, the show floors here in San Francisco still seemed light on foot traffic. And while my one-on-one company meetings were great, nearly every event I attended had either a misleading description or was canceled. I blame that partially on poor planning and/or marketing by our show hosts and partially on bad luck. So needless to say, when I started Thursday morning, already beaten down by the previous days’ schedules, I was less than happy to head over to Moscone. In fact, I skipped the first panel I had planned on attending.

I did, however, make it to my second Thursday DAC event, the STMicroelectronics keynote. Switzerland-based Alessandro Cremonesi, Strategy and System Technology Group VP and Advance System Technology general manager at ST, took the ...Read More

Sitting down in the conference hall at the Moscone Center for Tuesday's keynote, I couldn't help but feel a bit overwhelmed.  It was early, the hall was huge, the buzzing audience was multinational, and the morning began with the distribution of a number of important-sounding awards for projects and academic papers that, even with months of relatively in-depth technical reporting under my belt, I couldn't begin to wrap my mind around. As TI's CTO  Hans Stork delved deeply into EDA during his highly technical keynote, complete with flow chart graphics, I wondered how in over my head I'd feel for most of the day.

Luckily, things got much better from there. The most enjoyable part of the convention for me was not the exhibits on the convention floor, which is an exciting yet dizzying place, but rather was the time I spent sitting in a small pr...Read More

Attending the Design Challenges for Multimedia panel today, the topic of ease of use in consumer electronics came up. An attendee, who referred to herself as a baby boomer, noted that her 15-year-old son can pick up any handheld device and within minutes has mastered it. She asked the panel, which included execs from Intel, IBM, Samsung and Nvidia, among others, what they planned on doing to encourage ease of use for her generation. The panel’s joint conclusion was that, because there are no cross consumer electronics standards (one device doesn’t always work like or with another), there was no simple answer.
Unsatisfied with that response, another baby boomer stepped up to the mic to continue the line of questioning. He reiterated that his teenager could do the same, but he, a man in his late 40s, couldn’t. This was at about 3pm. People were getting rundow...Read More

I’m beginning to wonder what DFM really stands for. I’ve decided that, in truth, it’s not design for manufacturability. Instead, DFM stands for “done forever marketing.” Anything that improves yield is highly valued here at DAC and in the semi industry overall, for that matter. But as I’ve come to see in the recent years I’ve been covering EDA, this industry is as much about hyping a technology as it is fixing design issues. Hype is good, excitement about anything as influential as DFM (the real DFM) is good, but it has its limits. The negative side effect of all of the hype DFM has gotten over the past years and DAC shows is that now that it has arrived, it’s not as big of a deal as it should be. Two days into DAC, and only one company seriously spoke to me about its DFM work, Magma. What are companies talking about? ESL, or ...Read More

As Semicon enters its third day of exhibition, moving to the 450mm wafer size is high on the radar screen of many attendees, with opinions strongly divided. Proponents believe it is just a matter of time since it will keep Moore’s law on track. Naysayers believe that since some investments in 300mm have not yet been recouped even today, there will be reluctance by industry players, and that it is simply a matter of economics.

The immersion lithography topic has been batted around extensively at the show for its potential to extend the technology to 193nm. IMEC, the Belgian research organization, says immersion lithography will not be ready by the 45nm mode, and possibly not even 32nm. Micron just joined the effort. Sounds like IMEC has their fingers crossed but their...Read More

While I know that one of these terms does not fit with the two others, it is interesting enough that I wanted to include it in this entry.

Starting with atomic layer deposition (ALD), a panel of folks gathered Tuesday to discuss the market that Aviza Technology—which has ALD tools not surprisingly—hopes will reach the potential that industry guru Dan Hutcheson from VLSI Research predicts of $487.3 million by 2010 from $172.4 million last year. This technology sits near chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and physical vapor deposition (PVD), but is different in that it allows device layers to be built up one at a time, in a much more precise method.

Anything you can do on an atomic layer basis is pretty amazing stuff to me, but also interesting to think that there is technology that allows the manipulation of atoms. In addition to Aviza, Aixtron, ASMI and ...Read More