When we were first introduced to earbuds, in-ear speakers connected through thin wires to your phone (and earlier portable music devices), they seemed pretty convenient for private entertainment at work, while walking, exercising, doing almost anything. Until we started to realize those long dangly wires weren’t ideal. They’d… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
RISC-V End to End Solutions for HPC and Networking
Semiconductor IP is one of the more exciting and most viewed topics we cover on SemiWiki, it has been that way since we began in 2011 and that trend will continue indefinitely, my opinion.
Semiconductor IP: Total Blogs: 640: Total Views: 3253751: Average: 5084
Based on the design starts we track, Cloud Computing is a leading semiconductor… Read More
Security and RISC-V
One of the challenges in the RISC-V bid for world domination may be security. That may seem like a silly statement, given that security weaknesses are invariably a function of implementation and RISC-V doesn’t define implementation, only the instruction-set architecture (ISA). But bear with me. RISC-V success depends heavily… Read More
On-Chip Networks at the Bleeding Edge of ML
I wrote a while back about some of the more exotic architectures for machine learning (ML), especially for neural net (NN) training in the data center but also in some edge applications. In less hairy applications, we’re used to seeing CPU-based NNs at the low end, GPUs most commonly (and most widely known) in data centers as the workhorse… Read More
Is IP SoC 2018 Still Alive? Better than Ever!
The 21[SUP]st[/SUP] IP-SoC Days conference will be held in Grenoble, France, on December 5-6, 2018. IP-SoC is now the unique IP centric conference, with presentations reflecting the complete IP ecosystem: IP suppliers and foundries, external IP or internal reuse managers. Look at the program, you will see the hot topics covered… Read More
Making AI Silicon Smart with PVT Monitoring
PVT – depending on what field you are in those three letters may mean totally different things. In my undergraduate field of study, chemistry, PVT meant Pressure, Volume & Temperature. Many of you probably remember PV=nRT, the dreaded ideal gas law. However, anybody working in semiconductors knows that PVT stands … Read More
Dover Microsystems Spins New Approach to Security
One of the companies I met at ARM TechCon was Dover Microsystems who offer a product in embedded security. You might ask why we need yet another security solution. Surely we’re overloaded with security options from ARM and many others in the forms of TEEs, secure boots, secure enclaves and so on? Why do we need more? Because defending… Read More
Verifying a RISC-V in 1 Page of Code!
This is it! This is the single page of code that Ákos Hadnagy wrote this summer to formally verify WARP-V, an open-source RISC-V CPU core.… Read More
Eta Compute Receives Two Awards from ARM at TechCon
Many startups set out with the goal of accomplishing a technical feat that was previously considered impossible. Quite frankly most do not succeed. Yet, occasionally a company comes along that succeeds with a game changing breakthrough. ETA Compute has done just this. Yet, even more impressively, this 3-year-old company has… Read More
SiFive Extends Portfolio with 7 Series RISC-V Cores
At the recent Linley Fall Processor Conference in Santa Clara, Jack Kang, SiFive’s VP of Product Marketing introduced SiFive’s Core IP 7 Series.Designed to power devices requiring Embedded IntelligenceandIntelligence Everywhere,the cores allow scalability, efficient performance and customization. The Core IP 7 Series… Read More


RISC-V and AI: The Architecture Shift Is Now