Synopsys Acquires Coverity

Synopsys Acquires Coverity
by Paul McLellan on 02-19-2014 at 5:27 pm

Synopsys announced this afternoon that they are acquiring Coverity for $375M subject to all the usual reviews.

There are a couple of other big EDA connections. Aki Fujimora, who was CTO of Cadence, is on the board. And Adreas Kuehlmann is the VP of R&D. He used to run Cadence Berkeley Laboratories before moving to the other end… Read More


Xilinx: Delivering a Generation Ahead

Xilinx: Delivering a Generation Ahead
by Paul McLellan on 02-19-2014 at 4:15 pm

Last week was Xilinx’s investor day. Xilinx believe they are now a process generation ahead. They did over $100M in 28nm designs in FY2013 (Xilinx FY ended March 2013) and did over over $100M in Q4 2013 calendar year alone (and this is almost all true production volume, with only about 5% prototypes) with a plan greater than … Read More


Brian Krzanich Does Reddit AMA

Brian Krzanich Does Reddit AMA
by Paul McLellan on 02-19-2014 at 1:03 pm

Do you know what an AMA is on Reddit? It stands for “ask me anything”. A person, often a famous person like Bill Gates (last week) but sometimes just someone who does an interesting job (like astronaut) or was in an interesting situation (like the hijack from Ethiopia last week).

Today, it is someone who argualble is all… Read More


Verification of Power Delivery Networks

Verification of Power Delivery Networks
by Paul McLellan on 02-18-2014 at 2:43 pm

Power delivery networks (PDN) are the metal structures on a chip that delivers the power. In a high-end desktop SoC this might be delivering as much as 150W, and with voltages around 1V that means over 150 amps of current. Clearly getting the PDN correct is critical for a correctly functioning chip. One of the challenges to verifying… Read More


Power Control Moving into Hardware

Power Control Moving into Hardware
by Paul McLellan on 02-14-2014 at 6:30 pm

Sonics have been building networks-on-chips (NoCs) for a long time and have amassed a rich patent portfolio. So being granted a new one isn’t usually deemed press-release-worthy. However, their latest patent on power management is pretty significant. It is patent 8,601,288 titled “Intelligent Power Controller”.

Historically… Read More


Quoting Automatically the eSilicon Way

Quoting Automatically the eSilicon Way
by Paul McLellan on 02-13-2014 at 2:31 pm

Every ASIC company has a major challenge: they have to work out what it is going to cost to build the customer’s product and commit to deliver it at that price. Too high and you lose the business. Too low and you will wish you’d lost the business. Historically this has been done largely manually. This is an expensive process.… Read More


Migrating to Andes from 8051

Migrating to Andes from 8051
by Paul McLellan on 02-11-2014 at 5:21 pm

The 8051 microcontroller has been around for years…decades in fact. It was originally developed in 1980 by Intel. Back then it required 12 clock cycles per instruction but modern cores use just one. While it is still widely used, mostly as an IP core for SoCs, it is running out of steam despite running over 50 times faster than… Read More


A Brief History of Atmel

A Brief History of Atmel
by Paul McLellan on 02-11-2014 at 4:12 pm

Atmel was founded in 1984. The name stands for “advanced technology for memory and logic” although initially the focus was on memory. George Perlegos the founder had worked in the memory group of Intel back when Intel was a memory company and not a microprocessor company although that didn’t stop Intel suing… Read More


ARM Announces A17

ARM Announces A17
by Paul McLellan on 02-11-2014 at 12:36 pm

It is microprocessors all the time right now, with Linley last week. Today ARM announced the next generation Cortex-A17 core. It is a development built on the Cortex-A12 core, itself built on A7 (which is the current volume leader). ARM says that it is 60% faster than the A7 core, although I’m sure a lot of that gain is a process… Read More


Data Outgrowing Datacenter Performance

Data Outgrowing Datacenter Performance
by Paul McLellan on 02-10-2014 at 1:13 pm

Last week I attended the Linley Datacenter Conference. This is not the conference on mobile which is not until April. However, a lot of the growth in datacenter is driven by mobile, with the increasing dominance of the model where data is accessed by smartphones but a lot of the backend computing and datastorage is in the cloud.

From… Read More