You have certainly experienced that modern mobile phones are used for more than phone calls and do not have room for multiple connectors. A new approach for audio connectivity is needed, allowing product designers to retire the 3.5mm jack. Considering the USB audio protocol to replace the analog audio solutions, typically using… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
When Once is Not Enough, But Unlimited is Too Much
When people think about non volatile memory, the first thing that usually comes to mind is NAND flash like that used in SSD’s or in microcontrollers to hold on-board code. Of course, there is also EEPROM and other types of NVM as well that can be used to hold data and code for the multitude of connected devices that are so common now. For… Read More
One Cellular Technology to Rule Them All
5G, the planned successor to earlier mobile network standards, holds all kinds of promise for new capabilities beyond LTE, but for a while seemed stuck in debate on exactly what the standard should cover. Several problems are apparent. A path to higher bit-rates is complicated because of spectrum shortage and fragmentation (plans… Read More
Apple Going (IP) Vertical with no Imagination!
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
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
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet