USB 3 protocol is now height years old, but USB 3.1 is much more recent (2014). The adoption behavior for USB protocol is unique, as USB 2.0 bandwidth (480 Mbps) is largely enough for certain applications. Nevertheless we have seen the sales for USB 3 IP passing the USB 2 in value during 2014, and the total USB IP segment becoming the … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Arteris Unveils Solution for Heterogeneous Cache Coherent SOC’s
Designing SOC’s for markets like automotive and mobile electronics requires taking advantage of every opportunity for optimization. One way to do this is through building a cache coherent system to boost speed and reduce power. Recently, NXP decided to go about this on their automotive MCU based SOC’s by using Arteris’ just-announced… Read More
Moving chips from industrial to industrial IoT
IHS has put out its 1Q2016 Application Market Forecast predicting the highest growth rate segments for semiconductors over the next five years – and what was once old is new yet again. There it is, in the top right corner: industrial, projected to outpace even the automotive sector.… Read More
ARM tests out TSMC 10FinFET – with two cores
About 13 months ago, the leak blogs posted news of “Artemis” on an alleged ARM roadmap slide, supposedly a new 16FF ARM core positioned as the presumptive successor to the Cortex-A57. Now, we’re finding out what “Artemis” may actually be, inside a multi-core PPA test chip on TSMC 10FinFET.… Read More
Autotalks’ New V2X Processor Integrates CEVA-XC DSP to Support IEEE802.11p and WiFi
V2X stands for Vehicle to Everything and to be specific, V2X technology connects vehicles to other vehicles (V2V), infrastructure (V2I), motorcycles (V2M) and pedestrians (V2P) within wireless range for safety and mobility applications. If you consider that the US Department of transportation (USDOT) is expected to publish… Read More
Where are the Entrepreneurs?
This week I attended the UpWest Labs event in San Francisco. UpWest Labs provides seed funding and incubation for a wide range of domains including Enterprise Software, Internet of Things, Infrastructure Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Consumer Applications, Drones, Cyber Security, Augmented Reality / Virtual … Read More
Cache Coherent Systems Get a Boost from New Technology
The speed and power penalties for accessing system RAM affect everything from artificial intelligence platforms to IoT sensor nodes. There is a huge power and performance overhead when the various IP blocks in an SOC need to go to DRAM. Memory caches have become essential to SOC design to reduce these adverse effects. However, … Read More
ARM Server Update (NFV)
There has been a lot of buzz in the industry over the last several years about ARM Holdings’ and its partners’ plans to go after the datacenter market with a particular focus on servers. Companies like Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AppliedMicro), Cavium, and Qualcomm, are now in various stages of product… Read More
Why NXP is Moving to FD-SOI (Part II)
At NXP, we’re very excited about the prospects for our new i.MX 7 and 8 series of applications processors, which we’re manufacturing on 28nm FD-SOI. As noted in part I of this article series, the new i.MX 7 series, which leverages the 32-bit ARM v7-A core, is targeting the general embedded, e-reader, medical, wearable… Read More
Sonics opens new strategy for SoC energy processing
Back in February when we shared the Sonics philosophy on the ICE-Grain Power Architecture for hardware-based SoC power management, I speculated we’d know more by DAC 2016. Sonics is hitting the road with a new live seminar coming to Silicon Valley this month and Austin during DAC – and the news is big.… Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification