Abhijit Athavale's Blog

Image Source: Prpl Foundation I initially got interested in board farms because a client of mine, Softnautics , is working with several companies to build and develop the software infrastructure required to run such farms. As I started looking for reading material on the web, it wasn't easy to find a page that explains what a board farm is in simple terms. There exist a number of amazing sites like elinux.org  that curate lists of products, software repositories and tech presentations intended for the power users. My intention here is to only provide an introduction to this topic and not delve into the details. Readers that have a deeper interest can explore other resources further. First a bit of history. Here's an intro from the Prpl Foundation .  Mike Anderson here, an Engineer at Qualcomm Atheros, Inc. We recently posted a new open source project to Github that I’m pretty excited about, called boardfarm.  It was created two years ago, and has been used daily to automaticall

No one knew or forecasted that the market for semiconductor design engineering talent worldwide would get red hot and stay that way for the past few years. There are multiple reasons why this is happening of course and my goal is to not delve into that. Most experienced people that have been a part of the ups and downs of the previous semiconductor cycles believed that the current situation would ease out in a few quarters. That assumption has not born fruit. As a result, large semiconductor services providers started looking at acquiring smaller players to add optionality to their operations - growing headcount and expanding their footprint across multiple geographies became the new corporate strategy.  Let's look at the deals over the past few years: A note to my non-Indian readers - I have used Crores as a unit of money prevalent in India. A Crore is equivalent to 10 Million. If you are looking to convert this into US $, you should multiply the number in Crores by 10 and then di

  When I wrote the blog post on Semiconductor bloggers, I thought that it was challenging to find blogs. But boy, was I wrong - it's much, much harder to find independent EDA and IP bloggers. There are plenty of syndicated and corporate blogs that cover EDA, but I did not want to add them to this list because there's a product marketing flavor to that content and face it, a Cadence blog will not cover a Synopsys tool, without regard. While Googling this, I came across some really promising links that I thought would make my job easier, but no such luck. For example, the incomparable Steve Leibson has this page called the EDA bloggers list on EDN from way back in 2008, but all links are broken. Sean Murphy on his blog in 2009 romanticizes what will happen to EDA blogging in 2011 when there are 500 EDA blogs, while going on to list an incredible 238 blogs, a valid concern at the time. Unfortunately, none of the independent blogs have survived, save his own blog.  There are still

  It’s been challenging to find top semiconductor blogs that actually add value. If you Google this, you get a very long list of corporate blogs, optimized for search engines. It is time consuming to filter that list and actually find blogs that have interesting content. I decided to make it easy for everyone by creating a list of top semiconductor bloggers and Twitter handles. you will find some of them here on LinkedIn. Note: I do not have any association with any of the bloggers. These folks write a lot about processors - CPUs and GPUs. Persons behind this blog are unknown - we only know of  Nexus and Clamchowder https://semiaccurate.com/  This site mainly focuses on processors as well.  Charlie Demerjian  is the main writer/co-founder along with other writers Semianalysis , started by  Dylan Patel ,  this blog does deep dives into semi technologies business and operational strategies.  Fabricated Knowledge , started by  Doug Mule ,  this blog excels in long form primers and deeply

  A recent  announcement  that the Vedanta Group, an Indian mining and minerals conglomerate is partnering with Foxconn, a giant Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturer, to build a fab in India seems to have confused the experts. I wonder why the experts always appear to be stumped. Perhaps, because they are experts? If they would just try and understand Foxconn group's history, there'd be no more stumping. In 2016 Foxconn acquired Sharp Electronics. Sharp has a .13µ 8"fab. In 2018, EE Times  reported  that Foxconn plans to invest $9Bn in a fab in Zhuhai, China. Foxconn was expected to draw on the Sharp fab to get this started . “One of the Hon Hai group’s (aka Foxconn) goals when acquiring Sharp was to gain semiconductor technology,” Tokyo-based Mizuho Securities analyst Yasuo Nakane told EE Times. In March of 2020, Foxconn  warned  of materials shortage. What does Vedanta excel in? You see my point? . There's also this: "It set up a  IC packaging and testing

 This is a repost from my old wordpress blog. I am planning to shut it down. Are we really out of the most dreaded recession after the great depression and on our path to recovery? The answer might be a resounding yes if we look at the recent crop of earnings reports from technology companies, and other data emerging from market analysis firms. In fact, the NASDAQ composite is already into deeply positive territory on the expectations of an imminent recovery. However, a quick dissection of recent earnings announcements from a few prominent semiconductor companies shows that we are not out of the woods yet. The chart above shows that sales numbers are still horribly bad compared to last year, and inventories have declined sharply as well. This means that companies have managed to satisfy the underlying demand by using up their inventories, and will or already have started ordering replacement units from fabs. This explains why the fabs have reported better numbers than the IC vendors. I