You are currently viewing SemiWiki as a guest which gives you limited access to the site. To view blog comments and experience other SemiWiki features you must be a registered member. Registration is fast, simple, and absolutely free so please,
join our community today!
There is a new edition of Hennessy and Patterson’s book Computer Architecture: A Quantative Approach out. The 5th edition.
There is lots of fascinating stuff in it but what is especially interesting to those of us who are not actually computer architects, is the big picture stuff about what they choose to cover. Previous … Read More
What is a custom processor? Or Application Specific Instruction-set Processor (ASIP) which is the buzzword which may or may not catch on.
Most programming is done on a processor with a fixed instruction set: think Intel x86 or ARM. Intel or ARM decided on what instructions to include, based on a lot of benchmarking across a wide range… Read More
Due to a lot of somewhat aggressive marketing by carriers, you might think that 4G wireless is already here. After all, wasn’t 3G ages ago? But in fact true 4G handsets won’t really be available until 2015/6. But to make that schedule, first silicon needs to be available late this year or early next, to allow one or two … Read More
Back in the Napoleonic era it was possible to manage a battle with very ad hoc methods. Sit on a horse on top of the highest hill and watch the battle unfold, send messengers out with instructions. By the First World War, never mind the second, that approach was hopelessly outdated and a much more structured way of managing a battle was… Read More
Unmanned systems are becoming indispensable to military forces and are used across all of land, sea and air. The generic name for such unmanned systems is UXS, usually UAS (air), UGS (ground) or UUS (underwater). The UAS is the most visible, both due to military strikes and the views of Japan after the Tsunami when areas were unreachable… Read More
I have been saying for years, ever since I started working at VaST, the biggest barrier to adoption of virtual platform technology for what I like to call virtualized software development is the availability of models. If models do not already exist when they are needed there are two issues: it takes money to develop them but, probably… Read More
The EDAC Emerging Companies Comittee (would that be the EDACECC?) is organizing a free panel session one evening at DVCon. It is Monday February 27th from 6pm to 8.30pm. I don’t yet have a room but it will be at the DoubleTree Hotel where DVCon is being held.
EDA companies often address hardware/software co-design from a hardware… Read More
It is interesting watching as changes in technology bring giants to their knees. Far and away the best book on the subject is Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. If you haven’t read it then rush out and buy it immediately. In tech, you are not educated if you haven’t.
Two things made me think … Read More
FineSim is Magma’s circuit simulator that has been doing extraordinarily well. In my opinion it is one of the big reasons that Synopsys is acquiring (presumably, still subject to approval of course) Magma. FineSim is especially strong in the memory market with over 70% of the top 5 DRAM manufacturers and the top 10 flash manufacturers… Read More
Things you don’t know about Virtuoso: we’ve got you cornered.
That is the title on a Cadence blog item last week. It is actually about variability and how to create various corners for simulation and analysis, but given Cadence’s franchise for Virtuoso, its lock-in through SKILL-based PDKs and so forth, it … Read More
Achieving Seamless 1.6 Tbps Interoperability for High BW HPC AI/ML SoCs: A Technical Webinar with Samtec and Synopsys