Well a very belated Happy New Year dear reader. I must admit, it has been a very long winter and it has caused the Miller’s to rethink this vital question. “What in the world are we doing living in NY”. So we are moving, and hopefully this is my last ‘real’ winter as we headed down south. To perhaps alleviate some of the winter blues from … Read More
Got FPGA Timing Closure Problems?
I had a meeting with Harn Hua Ng, the CEO of Plunify, a couple of weeks ago. They are an EDA company that I’d never heard of. Partially that is because they only play in the FPGA space, a country I visit less frequently than SoC land. Plus, they are based in Singapore, a country I have only been to a couple of times in my life.
Plunify… Read More
Dealing with FPGA IP in all its forms
One of the recurring themes I see here in the pages of SemiWiki and elsewhere is this pitched, bordering on religious battle between Altera and Xilinx. Just because both are FPGA technologies, the tendency is to put them in the same bucket, drawing direct comparisons between them. Some folks say there is no comparison; Xilinx has… Read More
Tabula Closes its Doors
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
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
Xilinx ships the VU440 and its 4M logic cells
Xilinx has delivered not only “the biggest FPGA on the planet”, but what it claims is currently the world’s largest integrated circuit: the Virtex UltraScale VU440, with 19 billion transistors fabbed in TSMC 20nm. The list of first customers to receive parts says a lot about the state of SoC design today, and the vital role FPGA-based… Read More
FPGA vendor to buy IC vendor Silicon Image
Interesting news today : Lattice Semiconductor, FPGA vendor is buying Silicon Image. In fact, Silicon Image is a chip vendor, but also an innovator, licensing well known IP like HDMI, MHL and more. If we consider the amount paid for Silicon Image ($600 million), compared with the last full year revenue, $276M in 2014, that’s a 2.2X… Read More
QuickLogic betting big on sensor hubs
QuickLogic Corp.—the former FPGA maker that reinvented itself through configurable design for consumer electronics (CE) products—is taking its sensor hub arsenal to high pitch at the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Sensor hub, a companion to application processor, offloads data from sensors… Read More
New Vivado Release. And a Competition!
It is not entirely clear what Xilinx is these days. Of course it is an FPGA company. If you hear the word FPGA then I bet Xilinx is the first thing you think of. But what Xilinx ships these days is a far cry from the type of device it created when it was starting, where FPGAs were largely used to vacuum up all the glue logic around the processors… Read More
Components for Wearables, Making the IoT Real
The screenwriter William Goldman is famous for saying that in Hollywood “Nobody knows anything.” Meaning that there is simply no way for any of the people involved to be able to predict which movies will turn out to be hits and which will be flops. I think the internet of things (IoT) is going to be like that. There will … Read More
What would you do if you were the CEO of Intel?