What conclusion could we derive from the recent (April 3) PR from Imagination where we learn that the company “has been notified by Apple Inc. (“Apple”), its largest customer, that Apple is of a view that it will no longer use the Group’s intellectual property in its new products in 15 months to two years time, and as such will not be … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Lowering Costs for Custom SoC Development – ARM and Tanner EDA
Cost is a major barrier when an electronic design company starts to consider developing a custom SoC for a particular market segment. But what if there was a way to lower the development cost, or even get to an SoC proof of concept for no cost except of course for your engineering expenses? That value proposition caught my attention… Read More
When is "off" not really off?
With the old fashioned on-off power switch came certainty of power consumption levels. This was fine back in the days before processor controlled appliances and devices. On was on and off was off: full current or no current. With the first personal computers you always had to wait for the boot process to complete before you could … Read More
Who knew designing PLL’s was so complicated?
Well it comes as no surprise to those that use and design them, that PLL’s are a world unto themselves and very complicated indeed. With PLL’s we are talking about analog designs that rely on ring oscillators or LC tanks. They are needed on legacy nodes, like the ones that IoT chips are based on, and they are crucial for high speed advanced… Read More
ARMing AI/ML
There is huge momentum building behind AI, machine learning (ML) and deep learning; unsurprisingly ARM has been busy preparing their own contribution to this space. They announced this week a new multi-core micro-architecture called DynamIQ, covering all Cortex-A processors, whose purpose is in their words, “to redefine … Read More
How to Design a Custom SoC with Analog, webinar from ARM and Tanner EDA
Leading edge SoC designs can contain billions of transistors, cost over $10M to design, and take over 18 months to deliver, but not all SoCs require that much complexity, cost and time. In fact, there is a growing class of SoC designs that integrate the popular ARM Cortex-M0 processor along with analog blocks that work with sensors… Read More
Samsung Should Just Buy eSilicon Already!
As you all know I’m a big fan of the ASIC business dating back to the start of the fabless semiconductor transformation where anybody could send a design spec to an ASIC company and get a chip back. The ASIC business model also started the smart phone revolution when Samsung built the first Apple SoCs for the iPhones and iPads.
Today … Read More
What’s better than silicon-proven IP? Lab bench-proven!
The SoC industry depends upon the availability of validated IP. SoC designs require a huge investment, and assume the external IP that is licensed from outside parties satisfies all functional and electrical specifications. To support that requirement, IP providers typically pursue a strategy to demonstrate their designs… Read More
Webinar: CEVA on basestation design for 5G NR
Conventional wisdom is that 5G is still somewhere on the hype curve – expected to arrive someday but still not a near-term technology. As is often the case, conventional wisdom seems to be wrong. Coming out of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, semiconductor and carrier heavyweights have committed to accelerate deployment… Read More
Securing Your IoT System using ARM
I’ll never forget reading about and experiencing the October 21, 2016 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks which slowed and shut down a lot of the Internet. On that particular attack the target was to shut down the Domain Name System (DNS). Traffic for this massive DDoS attack came from IoT devices which were unsecured… Read More
cHBM for AI: Capabilities, Challenges, and Opportunities