Macbeth may have been uncertain of what he saw but, until recently, image recognition systems would have fared even less well. The energy and innovation put into increasingly complex algorithms always seemed to fall short of what any animal (including us humans) is able to do without effort. Machine vision algorithms have especially… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
New CoreLink IP ties in mobile GPU coherently
A mobile GPU is an expensive piece of SoC real estate in terms of footprint and power consumption, but critical to meeting user experience demands. GPU IP tuned for OpenGL ES is now a staple in high performance mobile devices, rendering polygons with shading and texture compression at impressive speeds.
Creative minds in the desktop… Read More
Shifting Low Power Verification to an IP to SoC Flow
One of the most exciting recent developments in low power design and verification is the successive refinement flow developed by ARM® and Mentor Graphics®.… Read More
Do 8 Cores Really Matter in Smartphones?
As the smartphone industry has begun to mature, one-upmanship among smartphone manufacturers and SoC vendors has bred a dangerous trend: ever-increasing processor core counts and the association between increased CPU core count and greater performance. This association originated as SoC vendors and OEMs have tried to find… Read More
To err is runtime; to manage, NoC
Software abstraction is a huge benefit of a network-on-chip (NoC), but with flexibility comes the potential for runtime errors. Improper addresses and illegal commands can generate unexpected behavior. Timeouts can occur on congested paths. Security violations can arise from oblivious or malicious access attempts.
Runtime… Read More
How to Make Smartphone Even Smarter? With Deep Learning
The IT industry marvels like augmented reality and artificial intelligence, which marked technological utopianism in the science fiction movies during the 1970s and 1980s, are here now, enabled by a machine-learning technique called deep learning.… Read More
Eliminating the Chasm of Computing
The world has come through a long way from the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] UNIVAC computer in 1952, IBM mainframes and minicomputers in secured computer rooms to laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and so on in our hands. Imagine the compute power of a minicomputer then and the compute power of your smartphone or tablet today. And do you know the… Read More
Interconnect Watch: 3 Chip Design Merits for Network Applications
The countdown to the end of Moore’s Law is coinciding with the rising complexity in system-on-chip (SoC) designs. And that’s not a mere coincidence. The leverage that has long been coming from shrinking process nodes in terms of cost, performance and power benefits is now increasingly being accomplished through… Read More
ARM Server Chips: What Qualcomm Wants?
Qualcomm has made the long-awaited foray into the ARM-based server chipsets and the trade media is presenting its 24-core SoC prototype as a challenger to Intel’s hegemony in the cloud server market. Is it so?… Read More
Extendible Processor Architectures for IoT Applications
The Internet of Things has become a ubiquitous term, to refer to a broad (and somewhat ill-defined) set of electronic products and potential applications – e.g., wearables, household appliances and controllers, medical applications, retail applications (signage, RFID), industrial automation, machine-to-machine communication,… Read More
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