Verification
This functional verification interview question asks you to choose between keeping both a functional and a timing simulator, or dropping one of them to buy more compute. A strong answer keeps functional simulation, because it is where most bugs are found and fixed cheaply, and treats timing simulation and the FPGA board as complementary ways to catch timing problems. In practice most candidates should choose FTB, consider FCB, and reject TCB, …
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 08, 2020
Samsung
News, June 2020, with background and an update added in November 2026. At the 2020 OCP Global Summit, Samsung gave details of an Ethernet-attached solid-state drive, the E-SSD, that speaks NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) directly on the network. Instead of sitting behind a server CPU, PCIe switches and a network card, each drive is its own network endpoint. Samsung said the drive reaches PCIe Gen4 x4 class performance, about 1,500K (1.5 million) …
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 01, 2020
News
On 28 May 2020 the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched an 8GB version of the Raspberry Pi 4 at $75, doubling the largest memory option, which had been 4GB. The Raspberry Pi 4 was then sold with 2GB ($35), 4GB ($55) or 8GB ($75) of RAM, making it the most powerful Raspberry Pi at the time. To use all 8GB in a single program, the Foundation also released an early beta of a 64-bit version of its operating system. This post was first written on 29 May …
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 29, 2020
News
In May 2020 Looking Glass Factory began shipping its 8K holographic display, a glasses-free light field monitor that uses 33.2 million pixels and a 45-element light field to give a 3D effect, as TechCrunch reported. It was aimed at enterprise users in fields such as medical imaging, mapping, automotive, architecture and engineering, with pricing available only on request. This post records that launch and explains, in simple terms, how such a di…
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 28, 2020
News
News from May 2020. Amazon was in advanced talks to buy Zoox, a self-driving car start-up, in a move that would expand the e-commerce company's reach in autonomous-vehicle technology, The Wall Street Journal reported. The talks did lead to a deal: Amazon announced on 26 June 2020 that it had agreed to acquire Zoox, at a price reported to be a little over $1.2 billion. Key takeaways In May 2020 the WSJ reported that Amazon and Zoox were…
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 28, 2020
Processors
In May 2020 Linus Torvalds, the creator and lead maintainer of the Linux kernel, announced that his main desktop was no longer Intel-based for the first time in about 15 years. He had moved to an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, a 32-core, 64-thread workstation processor, and said his kernel test builds were now about three times faster. This post, first written on 25 May 2020, covers what he said, what the chip is, and why a kernel developer cares…
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 25, 2020
Texas Instruments
In May 2020 Texas Instruments removed the ability to run assembly (ASM) and C programs on its TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator and on its French counterpart, the TI-83 Premium CE. The change came with operating system updates (OS 5.6 for the TI-84 Plus CE and OS 5.5 for the TI-83 Premium CE), and calculators that installed them could not be rolled back to an older OS. TI said the move was meant to prioritise learning and reduce security risks, …
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 25, 2020
Semiconductor Manufacturing
News from May 2020. China's state-backed funds agreed to put about $2.25 billion into a wafer plant run by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), the country's largest contract chipmaker, to support advanced chip making as Washington tightened technology restrictions on China. The money went into SMIC's Shanghai joint venture for 14-nanometre and more advanced production, as reported by Bloomberg . Key takeaways …
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 19, 2020
News
In May 2020, early in the COVID-19 lockdowns, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that making remote work permanent could harm workers' social interaction and mental health. His point was not that working from home is bad, but that swapping the office entirely for remote work would trade one fixed rule for another, and that the social capital teams had built in person was being used up without anyone measuring it. Key takeaways Nadella …
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 19, 2020
VHDL
The workplace FSM challenge asks for a three-state machine (S0, S1, S2) that drives y combinationally in S0 and drives z in the cycle after S0, while using as few states, edges, transient states and registers as possible. The minimum answer is three clocked states, four edges, no transient states and two flip-flops: y is a multiplexer of j and k selected by a in S0, and z is simply m in S1 and n in S2, because the state the machine moves to alre…
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 18, 2020
TSMC
In May 2020 TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, was reported to be preparing to build an advanced chip factory in Arizona, and on 15 May 2020 it confirmed the plan: a 5-nanometre fab costing about 12 billion US dollars, with production targeted for 2024. The move came as the US government grew concerned about its dependence on Asia for leading-edge chips. This post was written on 14 May 2020, the day before the announcement, and th…
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 14, 2020
RF and Wireless
On 23 April 2020 the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted unanimously to open the 6 GHz band, 5.925 to 7.125 GHz, for unlicensed use. That added 1,200 MHz of spectrum for Wi-Fi, more than doubling what Wi-Fi had in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands combined, and created the room that Wi-Fi 6E devices were designed to use. Devices with the new antennas and chipsets were expected to start arriving later in 2020. Key takeaways The FCC o…
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Murugavel Ganesan
April 28, 2020
Semiconductor Business
On Intel's first-quarter 2020 earnings call on 23 April 2020, then CEO Bob Swan quoted his predecessor Andy Grove: bad companies are destroyed by crises, good companies survive them, and great companies are improved by them. Swan used the line to frame Intel's response to COVID-19: support for its roughly 110,000 employees, a $50 million pandemic technology fund, and a promise that the 10nm roadmap and product launches would stay on trac…
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Murugavel Ganesan
April 25, 2020
TSMC
In April 2020, Bloomberg reported that Apple was on track to start selling Macs with its own processors in 2021, using chips built by TSMC on a 5-nanometre process. The report turned out to be right about the direction and the factory, and a little cautious on timing. Apple announced the switch in June 2020 and shipped the first Macs with its own M1 chip in November 2020. The original news report and our notes from April 2020 follow, with an upd…
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Murugavel Ganesan
April 24, 2020
News
News from April 2020. The RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry that serves Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, publicly came out against "New IP", a proposal to redesign the Internet's core protocols that was backed by Huawei, Chinese telecom operators and the Chinese government. Its position, set out by Marco Hogewoning, was that today's Internet has technical challenges but does not need a whole new archit…
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Murugavel Ganesan
April 24, 2020
VHDL
The best online VHDL resources today are a handful of long-lived tutorial sites (VHDL-Online, Doulos KnowHow, the UCR "Learn by Example" tutorial), a few classic free texts such as Ashenden's VHDL Cookbook, and free simulators you can run in a browser or on a laptop, such as EDA Playground, GHDL and NVC. Pair one tutorial with one good textbook and a free simulator, and write small designs from the first day. This page keeps the or…
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The Editor's Desk
January 08, 2014
Video
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 14, 2013
