Designers tend to put tons of energy into pre-silicon verification of SoCs, with millions of dollars on the line if a piece of silicon fails due to a design flaw. Are programmable logic designers, particularly those working with an SoC such as the Xilinx Zynq, flirting with danger by not putting enough effort into verification?… Read More
Author: Don Dingee
Semi execs look at IoT tradeoffs a bit differently
What happens when you get a panel of four executives together with an industry-leading journalist to discuss tradeoffs in IoT designs? After the obligatory introductions, Ed Sperling took this group into questions on power, performance, and integration.… Read More
Memory War Z: Samsung spins antidote to 3D XPoint
The 2016 edition of the Flash Memory Summit produced more than the usual amount of excitement. Samsung’s response to the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint challenge arrived in new slideware, indicating the war for next-generation SSDs is just starting. Who has the advantage?
We’d all like to think this is about creating a breakthrough technology,… Read More
Webinar Alert – Helping Mixed Signal not be Mixed Up
Today’s profound statement: “don’t fall in love with your tools, figure out the biz process change first.” Mixed-signal SoC designers are having ample challenges with their design process and are in need of design management, but don’t want another tool to do it.… Read More
Lethal data injection a much bigger threat
Watching a spirited debate on Twitter this morning between Tom Peters and some of his followers reminded me of the plot of many spy movies: silently killing an opponent with a lethal injection of some exotic, undetectable poison. We are building in enormous risks in more and more big data systems.… Read More
Burned again – can smartwatches recover?
With Intel’s Basis Peak smartwatch on intergalactic recall and Apple’s smartwatch sales falling faster than Skylab, designers now must face the real questions: 1) what is the right use case, and 2) what are the right chips to implement it?… Read More
One transistor for the future of mmWave?
We’ve heard recently from several sources that millimeter wave radios, once the exclusive realm of defense and satellite use, are now finding homes in applications such as automotive radar and 5G networks. Therein lies a significant opportunity for digital design: moving frequency conversion and filtering from the analog … Read More
Filling out the rest of the mobile device
We spend an inordinate amount of energy tracking the big chip – the application processor – in a mobile device. As we’ve seen this space is coming down to a handful of players. A more interesting competition is heating up around the APU for the rest of chips needed to make a phone.… Read More
SoC QoS gets help from machine learning
Several companies have attacked the QoS problem in SoC design, and what is emerging from that conversation is the best approach may be several approaches combined in a hybrid QoS solution. At the recent Linley Group Mobile Conference, NetSpeed Systems outlined just such a solution with an unexpected plot twist in synthesis.
The… Read More
A Chinese smartphone drill in progress
One of our astute readers caught what looks like a major gaffe in the Linley Group mobile conference presentations from this week. It’s another indication of the speed of change in mobile markets and the instability that is giving Apple and others heartburn.
Here’s the chart in question:
The point of contention is who, exactly, … Read More









Silicon Insurance: Why eFPGA is Cheaper Than a Respin — and Why It Matters in the Intel 18A Era