Cadence 2014 Results

Cadence 2014 Results
by Paul McLellan on 02-05-2015 at 7:01 pm

Cadence announced their Q4 and 2014 results yesterday. They are the only one of the big 3 EDA companies whose fiscal year is the calendar year so Synopsys and Mentor will not be joining them in announcing them this week.

I won’t go into the numbers in detail, you can find them all easily enough. But it is a pity that statements like… Read More


Concept: From Schematics to Debug

Concept: From Schematics to Debug
by Paul McLellan on 02-05-2015 at 7:00 am

In the late 1990s I was the VP Engineering at Ambit Design Systems. We had a synthesis product (called BuildGates, nobody ever forgot the name). Both our own engineers and our customers wanted to be able to take a look at the gate-level netlist that was generated from their RTL. We used a product from a company called Concept Engineering… Read More


New Suite of ARM IP for Mobile

New Suite of ARM IP for Mobile
by Paul McLellan on 02-04-2015 at 7:00 am

ARM had a big press/analyst show at the Epic Roasthouse here in San Francisco this morning. They announced a new portfolio of IP targeted at the next generation mobile experience. There were 4 components to the announcement:

  • A new microprocessor, the Cortex-A72. More details below
  • New CoreLink CCI-500 Cache Coherent Interconnect
Read More

Samsung and Apple: What is Really Going On?

Samsung and Apple: What is Really Going On?
by Paul McLellan on 02-01-2015 at 9:00 am

Apple reported that it sold $74.6B in products last quarter, and earned an all-time record (for any company) $18.06B in profits. Sammy reported its lowest quarterly profit since 2011 at $21.3Bk, down almost a third.

In 2013 mobile had been 70% of Sammy’s profits so any drop in revenue or profitability would have an amplified… Read More


NoC 102: Using SonicsGN to Address Low Power Requirements From IoT to Servers

NoC 102: Using SonicsGN to Address Low Power Requirements From IoT to Servers
by Paul McLellan on 01-29-2015 at 7:00 am

At the end of last year, I moderated a Sonics webinar to introduce the concept of a network-on-chip or NoC. It was called NoC 101 and the replay is still available here.

Well it is a new year and time for chapter 2. I will be moderating a webinar next Wednesday February 4th at 10am pacific time. Once again the webinar itself will be delivered… Read More


Qualcomm Earnings Call

Qualcomm Earnings Call
by Paul McLellan on 01-28-2015 at 9:35 pm

Qualcomm had their earnings call today. There has been a lot of discussion about their business going forward and they lowered guidance. They didn’t say explicitly why but in the usual Kabuik theater of these things this is what they did say:While our outlook for the first half of the fiscal year is ahead of our prior expectations,Read More


Tabula Closes its Doors

Tabula Closes its Doors
by Paul McLellan on 01-28-2015 at 3:55 pm

I heard a rumor at lunchtime that Tabula was closing its doors. A friend of mine talked to a couple of employees and it is true. They have to be given 2 months notice apparently so the doors don’t actually close until March 24th. I thought they had raised $150M but Wikipedia (not always reliable of course) says $215M. They were … Read More


Altera Back to TSMC at 10nm? Xilinx Staying There

Altera Back to TSMC at 10nm? Xilinx Staying There
by Paul McLellan on 01-28-2015 at 7:00 am

Xilinx announced their quarterly results last week. They slightly missed their number due mainly to a decline in wireless sales. Of course Xilinx parts don’t go in the smartphones since the cost and power are too high, but they are very heavily used in basestation, backhaul etc especially in China. Xilinx’s business… Read More


Analyzing Power Nets

Analyzing Power Nets
by Paul McLellan on 01-21-2015 at 7:00 am

One of the big challenges in a modern SoC is doing an accurate analysis of the power nets. Different layers of metal have very different resistance characteristics (since they vary so much in width and height). Even vias can cause problems due to high resistance. Typically power is distributed globally on high-level metal layers,… Read More


Methodics Access Controls

Methodics Access Controls
by Paul McLellan on 01-20-2015 at 7:00 am

My PhD thesis is titled The Design of a Network Filing System. Yes, that was a research topic back then (and yes, we did call them filing systems not file-systems). One big chapter was on access controls. There are several problems with designing an access control system:

  • it needs to be possible to implement it efficiently
  • it needs
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