ARM TechCon 2015 was another tour de force for ARM and its ecosystem. Besides some of the developments in mobile, IoT, and security (more coming soon in the Epilogue of “Mobile Unleashed”), there were two topics that I found very educational and will cover in blogs this week. One was how the Mali family is powering more than just mobile… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Strengthening That Serving ARM
Everyone is aware of ARM’s dominance in mobile devices and their likely dominance in IoT, but what about servers? ARM has been making a play for this area but conventional wisdom is that fortress Intel will protect its server market at all costs. You’ll hear that servers are not so much about compute power, they’re more about I/O and… Read More
ARM Announces Cortex-A35, mbed OS 3.0 at ARM TechCon 2015
Mike Muller, Chief Technology Officer of ARM, has announced the availability of Cortex-A35 processor core for low- to mid-range smartphones at the opening keynote of ARM TechCon on November 10, 2015 in Santa Clara, California. According to Muller, there are going to be 2.8 billion smartphones shipped this year, and more than … Read More
The Reason ARM Will Win IoT!
After spending the week in Silicon Valley at ARM TechCon and related meetings, there was one common thread amongst the presentations and conversations and that was security. No matter what the topic was, mobile, consumer or industrial IoT, wearables, automotive, etc… security always came up. The question I had was how will companies… Read More
When Talking About IoT, Don’t Forget Memory
Memory is a big enough topic that it has its own conference, Memcon, which recently took place in October. While I was there covering the event for SemiWiki.com I went to the TSMC talk on memory technologies for the IoT market. Tom Quan, Director of the Open Innovation Platform (OIP) at TSMC was giving the talk. IoT definitely has special… Read More
IP-SoC Rebound in 2015 !
Going to IP-SoC every year since 2006, I have enjoyed the conference as it’s the only one 100% IP focused and a very good opportunity to network within this rather small ecosystem of IP vendors… but I must admit that, since 2012, the attendance tend to be lower than before. Because of the well-known “chicken & egg” theorem, low … Read More
64-bit for the masses with Cortex-A35
It has been four years since the announcement of the ARMv8 instruction set, three years since the launch of the ARM Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores, and two years since the Apple A7 with its “Cyclone” core blew away any misunderstanding of 64-bit as being just for servers.
There is, however, still this idea that 64-bit is only for … Read More
Forget about ThunderBolt, USB Type C is here!
At the early days of Semiwiki (March 2011), I wrote about ThunderBolt, predicting low market adoption of the protocol, for various reasons. One of these reasons was the cost associated with ThunderBolt integration by the OEM. Even if the protocol (associating PCI Express and DisplayPort) was offering better data bandwidth than… Read More
ARM TechCon 2015 Preview!
Of all the live events I attend ARM TechCon is one of my favorites. The keynotes are always very good but the real meat of the conference is who attends because that is who the content is specifically developed for:… Read More
Why Gemini 2.0 is tailored for tomorrow’ SoC designs?
You probably have seen many times this graphic showing that the number of IP blocks has exploded, going from a few dozens in SoC designed in 65 nm to 120 if not more for last generation SoC targeting 16FF or 10FF. This graphic is very good at synthesizing the raw IP count, but it doesn’t tell you about another strong trend: more agents … Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki