We’ve all seen examples over the past few years of complex IoT technology solutions to help solve real-world problems from a variety of small companies. In fact, last year while I was at the ARM Holdings annual industry analyst conference and TechCon, a gathering of the ARM ecosystem powers, you could find hundreds, if not thousands… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Mobile Unleashed Review
The story starts for me back in the 1980s when one of my partners told us we had to buy a machine called a BBC micro and learn how to program it. When someone asked him what can it do, apart from play space invaders, I was told as a “for example”, I could store my wife’s recipes. To view results we would have to plug the machine… Read More
IP Development in Japan
As semiconductor IP is growing bigger in size and more complex in providing complete solution for a particular functionality in an SoC, regions from across the world are joining to provide various types of services in the overall value-chain of IP development, verification, and its integration into SoCs. … Read More
Interface IP year 2015: Winners and Losers
The global Interface IP market is still growing in 2015, no doubt about it. It’s interesting to zoom in the various protocols to check their respective behavior. Which protocol generates an IP business growing more than the average market? Which protocol generates a disappointing IP business? In other words, which are the winners… Read More
Who Does Voice Recognition in the Samsung Gear S2?
If you have bought a Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch for Christmas, you certainly didn’t open it to do a teardown. Chipworks did it and have shared the results: Qualcomm is the big winner here with five different chips: Snapdragon 400 as the main CPU of the system, the RF transceiver, the audio codec, the power and the baseband processor… Read More
Semiconductors Future Hinges on a Single Pillar
A unique phenomenon has started manifesting itself under the slew of mergers and acquisitions this year in the semiconductor landscape. This phenomenon is bound to intensify in the near future and would positions itself as a key factor for the future of the semiconductor industry. The winners and losers in the game would be determined… Read More
How Not To Be Incoherent
The advantage of working with cache memory is the great boost in performance you can get from working with a local high-speed copy of chunks of data from main memory. The downside is that you are messing with a copy; if another processor happens to be working in a similar area, there is a danger you can get out of sync when reading and writing… Read More
mbed OS abstraction battles IoT hyperfragmentation
In the days of bit banging and single-threaded loops, programming a microcontroller meant grabbing a C compiler (or even before that, an assembler) and some libraries and writing bare metal code. High performance networking and multi-tasking was usually the purview of heavier real-time operating systems (RTOS) or, if an MMU… Read More
Networking through Dark Silicon Power Islands
For decades, tracing back to the days of Deming, the way to tackle complex engineering problems has been the pareto chart. Charting conditions and their contribution to the problem leads to mitigation priorities.
In the case of SoC power management, the old school pareto chart said the processor core was the biggest power hog and… Read More
DSP gives Project Tango a power dip
Google’s Project Tango is a prime example of a sophisticated application pushing the boundaries of what is possible within the power envelope of a mobile device. Its objective is to combine 3D motion tracking with depth sensing to understand how a device is moving and gauge its surroundings precisely.… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet