Every day I read stuff about the coming of fully autonomous vehicles, and it’s not every day we get a technologist’s view of the hurdles faced in getting there. Chris Rowen, CTO of Cadence’s IP group, gave one of the best presentations I’ve seen on ADAS technology and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) at #53DAC, pointing… Read More
Cadence loads up on MACs for vision with CNNs
For vision DSP IP running convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a big driver of performance is increasing the bits processed per cycle with parallel MACs. Tom Simon did a great job in recent posts of introducing CNNs at a high level, so I’ll look at what is architecturally behind Cadence’s latest announcement: the Tensilica Vision… Read More
How to Solve the Business Gap in SEMI Industry?
This white paper about Cadence innovative mixed-signal IP concept “Cadence Multi-Link PHY IP (SerDes, Analog Front-end, and DDR) to Design SoC Platform breaking the “Business Gap” on 14/16FF” describe the problem, the emergence of a “business gap” linked with incredibly high development cost when targeting most advanced … Read More
Forget about ThunderBolt, USB Type C is here!
At the early days of Semiwiki (March 2011), I wrote about ThunderBolt, predicting low market adoption of the protocol, for various reasons. One of these reasons was the cost associated with ThunderBolt integration by the OEM. Even if the protocol (associating PCI Express and DisplayPort) was offering better data bandwidth than… Read More
Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me?
Macbeth may have been uncertain of what he saw but, until recently, image recognition systems would have fared even less well. The energy and innovation put into increasingly complex algorithms always seemed to fall short of what any animal (including us humans) is able to do without effort. Machine vision algorithms have especially… Read More
Tensilica 4th generation DSP IP is a VPU
You may not know Tensilica DSP IP core, but you probably use Tensilica DSP powered systems in your day to day life. Every year, over 2 billion DSP cores equip IC in thousands of designs supporting IoT, Mobile Phones, Storage/SSD, Networking, Video, Security, Cameras… and more. Why DSP processing, the foundation of all Tensilica… Read More
Adding NAND Flash Can Be Tricky
As consumers, we take NAND flash memory for granted. It has worked its way into a vast array of products. These include USB drives, SD cards, wearables, IoT devices, tablets, phones and increasingly SSD’s for computer systems. From the outside the magic of flash memory seems quite simple, but we have to remember that this is a technology… Read More
Xtensa core in Qualcomm low-power Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi has this reputation as being a power hog. It takes a relatively big processor to run at full throughput. It is always transmitting all over the place, and it isn’t very efficient at doing it. Most of those preconceived notions arose from older chips targeting the primary use case for Wi-Fi in enterprise and residential environments.… Read More
Which High B/W Memory to Select after DDR4?
Once upon a time, RAM technology was the driver of the semiconductor process. DRAM products were the first to be designed on a newest technology node and DRAM was used as a process driver. It was 30 years ago and the most aggressive process nodes were ranging between 1um and 1.5 um (1 500 nm!). Then in the 1990 the Synchronous Dynamic … Read More
Xtensa Fusion DSP Target IoT including Wireless and Security
Internet of Things (IoT) can be seen as a fashionable buzzword covering so many distinct applications that IoT is sometimes nick-named “Internet of Everything”, or it can be perceived as the next revolution in electronic systems generating more revenues than the smartphone and computer market together in 2020. But the industry… Read More