Arm Gets More Creative with Licensing

Arm Gets More Creative with Licensing
by Bernard Murphy on 08-01-2019 at 6:00 am

Arm flexible access

Without a doubt, RISC-V is generating a lot of buzz and I’m sure a lot of new designs, especially in spaces that are super-cost competitive or demand added differentiation in the processor. I doubt this is having meaningful impact on Arm business, in $$ rather than press. It takes a long time to replace an ecosystem of that size and … Read More


Mentor Highlights HLS Customer Use in Automotive Applications

Mentor Highlights HLS Customer Use in Automotive Applications
by Bernard Murphy on 07-30-2019 at 6:00 am

Catapult HLS

I’ve talked before about Mentor’s work in high-level synthesis (HLS) and machine learning (ML). An important advantage of HLS in these applications is its ability to very quickly adapt and optimize architecture and verify an implementation to an objective in a highly dynamic domain. Design for automotive applications – for … Read More


5G and V2X

5G and V2X
by Bernard Murphy on 07-25-2019 at 5:00 am

Amid the glamor of autonomous vehicles and hot new ADAS features, communication between vehicles and other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists or infrastructure, generally labeled V2X, doesn’t get as much press, perhaps because adoption is still pretty early or because it’s technology under the hood (quite literally) and therefore… Read More


PSS and Reuse: Great Solution But Not Hands-Free

PSS and Reuse: Great Solution But Not Hands-Free
by Bernard Murphy on 07-23-2019 at 6:00 am

If you’re new to PSS you could be forgiven for thinking that it automagically makes stimulus reusable, vertically from IPs to systems, horizontally between derivatives and between hardware-based and software-based testing. From a big-picture point of view these are certainly all potential benefits of PSS.

What PSS does provide… Read More


Location Indoors: Bluetooth 5.1 Advances Accuracy

Location Indoors: Bluetooth 5.1 Advances Accuracy
by Bernard Murphy on 07-18-2019 at 5:00 am

OK, so you’re in a giant mall, you want to find a store that sells gloves and you want to know how to get there. Or you’re in a supermarket and you need some obscure item, say capers, that doesn’t really fall under any of the main headings they post over the aisles. If you’re like most of us, certainly like me, this can be a frustrating experience.… Read More


Safety Methods Meet Enterprise SSDs

Safety Methods Meet Enterprise SSDs
by Bernard Murphy on 07-16-2019 at 5:00 am

The use of safety-centric logic design techniques for automotive applications is now widely appreciated, but did you know that similar methods are gaining traction in the design of enterprise-level SSD controllers? In the never-ending optimization of datacenters, a lot attention is being paid to smart storage, offloading… Read More


Smart Hearing is Heating Up

Smart Hearing is Heating Up
by Bernard Murphy on 07-10-2019 at 6:00 am

A lot of the attention in intelligent systems is on object detection in still or video images but there’s another very active area, in smart audio. Amazon and Google smart speakers may be the best-known applications but there are more obvious (and perhaps less novelty-driven) applications in enhancing the hearing devices we already… Read More


Jump-Starting Full-Stack AI

Jump-Starting Full-Stack AI
by Bernard Murphy on 07-03-2019 at 5:00 am

In the semiconductor world when we hear “full-stack” we think of a chip, chipset or board with a bunch of software, which can be connected to sensors of various types on one end, trained networks in the middle and actuators on the other side. But of course that’s not really a full-stack. The real thing would be deployment of an entire… Read More


An AI Accelerator Ecosystem For High-Level Synthesis

An AI Accelerator Ecosystem For High-Level Synthesis
by Bernard Murphy on 07-01-2019 at 10:00 am

AI accelerators as engines for object or speech recognition (among many possibilities), are becoming increasingly popular for inference in mobile and power-constrained applications. Today much of this inferencing runs largely in software on CPUs or GPUs thanks to the sheer size of the smartphone market, but that will shift… Read More


Integrated SIMs Will Unlock IoT Growth

Integrated SIMs Will Unlock IoT Growth
by Bernard Murphy on 06-27-2019 at 5:00 am

I’m a believer that connectivity for the IoT at scale (the trillions of devices that the industry predicts) has to be cellular. This is partly based on reach, particularly outside urban areas, but is mostly based on the financial implications of that scale. Yes, you can build infrastructure for say local Wi-Fi support with backhaul… Read More