If one wireless IoT technology fit every possible use case, we would have one specification. Many tradeoffs – battery life, mobility, indoor coverage, licensed versus unlicensed spectrum, and more – have made for many potential solutions. A heated discussion right now is over the future of LPWAN technologies, with LoRA, SIGFOX,… Read More
Internet of Things
Smarter Cities and The Internet of Things
Parking meters, information signs, CCTV, traffic signals – almost everywhere that you look in a modern city, there’s a microchip embedded device, connecting to what has now become known as the all-encompassing Internet of Things. Although we often overlook the fact, cities are, in essence, huge and complex businesses. Cities… Read More
Processors, Processors, Processors Everywhere
At first glance a processor conference might seem a bit arcane, however we live in an era where processors are ubiquitous. There is hardly any aspect of our lives that they do not touch in some way. Last week at the Linley Processor Conference the topics included deep learning, autonomous driving, energy, manufacturing, smart cities,… Read More
SiFive execs share ideas on their RISC-V strategy
Since its formation just last year, SiFive has been riding the RISC-V rocket from purely academic interest to first commercialization. In an exclusive discussion, I talked with CEO Stefan Dyckerhoff and VP of Product and Business Development Jack Kang about their progress so far and what may be coming next.
Previously, I covered… Read More
Power Exploration at RTL Design with Mentor PowerPro
There was a comment recently that design for low power is not an event, it’s a process; that comment is absolutely correct. Power is affected by everything in the electronic ecosystem, from application software all the way down to layout and process choices. Yet power as a metric is much more challenging to model and control than … Read More
It’s a heterogeneous world and cache rules it now
Cache evolved when the world was all about homogeneous processing and slow and expensive shared memory. Now, compute is just part of the problem – devices need to handle display, connectivity, storage, and other tasks, all at the same time. Different, heterogeneous cores handle different workflows in the modern SoC, and the burden… Read More
Getting out of DIY Mode for Virtual Prototypes
Virtual prototyping has, inexplicably, been largely a DIY thing so far. Tools and models have come from different sources with different approaches, and it has been up to the software development team to do the integration step and cobble together a toolchain and methodology that fits with their development effort.
That integration… Read More
Mentor Webinar on Power Exploration for Optimizing Power
There are a lot of clever techniques to automatically find and even implement methods for register gating and memory gating, but the bulk of power-saving still depends on designer and architect insight based on expected range of use of a device, complemented by practical use-case simulations. Of course this team needs to be able… Read More
Demystifying IoT – The 15 key building blocks of an IoT solution
IoT solution development is complex. In many cases, development entails combining expertise from a number of different areas such as embedded system engineering, connectivity solution design, big data handling, application development, and data encryption techniques. Each area demands a specific array of competences … Read More
CEO Interview: Xerxes Wania of Sidense
This is the first in a series of CEO interviews and I thought semiconductor IP would be a great place to start. Xerxes Wania is the President and CEO of Sidense, a leading developer of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) One-Time Programmable (OTP) IP cores. Sidense has been a part of SemiWiki since 2013 so we know them quite well. I hope the rest… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot