It’s popular to use DSP chips for vision processing in diverse applications like ADAS, security cameras and AR. Tensilica has been designing DSP chips and IP since 1997, and their technology was successful enough that Cadence acquired Tensilica back in 2013. At the IP-SoC Silicon Valley 2022 event in April I had the pleasure… Read More
Advantages of Large-Scale Synchronous Clocking Domains in AI Chip Designs
We are currently in the hockey stick growth phase of AI. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are happening at a lightning pace. And, while the rate of adoption is exploding, so is model size. Over the past couple of years, we’ve gone from about two billion parameters to Google Brain’s recently announced trillion-parameter… Read More
Tensilica Edge Advances at Linley
The Linley spring conference this year had a significant focus on AI at the edge, with all that implies. Low power/energy is a key consideration, though increasing performance demands for some applications are making this more challenging. David Bell (Product Marketing at Tensilica, Cadence) presented the Tensilica NNE110… Read More
Bigger, Faster and Better AI: Synopsys NPUs
AI-based applications are fast advancing with evolving neural network (NN) models, pushing aggressive performance envelopes. Just a few years ago, performance requirements of NN driven applications were at 1 TOPS and less. Current and future applications in the areas of augmented reality (AR), surveillance, high-end smartphones,… Read More
Future.HPC is Coming!
According to the experts, the semiconductor industry is poised for a decade of growth and is projected to become a trillion dollar industry by 2030. In 2021 the semiconductor industry finally hit $600B so $1T by 2030 seems like a big ask, but not really if you look at the indicators inside the semiconductor ecosystem. Foundries, … Read More
IP Subsystems and Chiplets for Edge and AI Accelerators
From a business viewpoint we often read in the technical press about the virtues of applying AI, and in the early days most of the AI model building was done in the cloud, because of the high computation requirements, yet there’s a developing trend now to use AI accelerators at the Edge. The other mega-trend in the past decade… Read More
High Efficiency Edge Vision Processing Based on Dynamically Reconfigurable TPU Technology
While many tough problems relating to computing have been solved over the years, vision processing is still challenging in many ways. Cheng Wang, Co-Founder and CTO of FlexLogix Technologies gave a talk on the topic of edge vision processing at Linley’s Spring 2022 conference. During that talk he references how Gerald Sussman… Read More
The Path Towards Automation of Analog Design
You may have noticed that I have been writing a lot more about analog design lately. This is no accident. Analog and custom blocks are increasingly important because of the critical role they play in enabling many classes of systems, such as automotive, networking, wireless, mobile, cloud, etc. Many of the SoCs needed for these… Read More
Bespoke Silicon is Coming, Absolutely!
It was nice to be at a live conference again. DesignCon was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, my favorite location, which to me there was a back to normal crowd. The sessions I attended were full and the show floor was busy. Masks and vaccinations were not required, maybe that was it. Or there was a pent-up demand to get back engaged… Read More
The Lost Opportunity for 450mm
I spent several days this week at the SEMI International Strategy Symposium (ISS). One of the talks was “Can the Semiconductor Industry Reach $1T by 2030” given by Bob Johnson of Gartner. His conclusion was, that $1 trillion dollars is an aggressive forecast for 2030 but certainly we should reach $1 trillion dollars in the next 10… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet