One of NetSpeed’s customers is a Tier-1 semiconductor company that develops some of the industry’s best performing and most complex system on chips (SoC) for the data center and cloud computing markets. To keep its leadership in the data center market, the company needs to produce best-in-class SoC solutions year after year. … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
True Random Number Generation
Random numbers are central to modern security systems. The humble password, perhaps the least profound application, is encrypted and verified against using SHA or MD algorithms with a random number salt. You probably remember a college class on how to generate pseudo-random numbers algorithmically, some very sophisticated.… Read More
Does IoT need Sensor Fusion? Yes, but at low-power, low cost…and higher performance
We said this in the past, but let’s reiterate that IoT devices will be successful if they can meet low-cost and low-power requirements. Low-cost is the condition for IoT devices market penetration, I mean such a market adoption that we count several IoT systems (and dozens of devices) in every house. That’s the only way to reach the… Read More
Smart TV Chipset: 4 Key Takeaways from Interconnect IP
The ultra high-definition (UHD) or 4K TV hardware is leading to insanely powerful chipsets in the age of Netflix, and that is taking the system-on-chip (SoC) design to a whole new level of complexity. Take the case of Samsung’s new chipset for SUHD TVs that boasts more than 100 IP interfaces.
Here, apart from the usual suspects… Read More
Steve Furber has found his million ARM cores
Some people say that everything in our lives happens for a reason. As we wrote Part I of “Mobile Unleashed”, the origin story of ARM architecture and its main progenitors Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, we found what seemed like an obvious technological breakthrough was far from an overnight success – and it led to fascinating twists… Read More
Chips on the road to deep learning
CES has been morphing into an automotive show for several years now. Chipmakers were pitching control solutions, infotainment solutions, then connectivity solutions. Phone makers pitched device integration. Automotive electronics suppliers pitched MEMS sensors and cameras. Now, with a lot of pieces in place, the story … Read More
How to Build a Deadlock-Free Multi-cores SoC?
We will precisely explain the meaning of deadlock in a modern, complex multi-core SoC. First, let’s take a look at the crash of the Air France 296, when a brand new Airbus A320 crashed during a demo flight on June 26, 1988. This Airbus 320, the first plane being completely automated, thanks to the FADEC flight system, was running a demo… Read More
ARM on Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?
On Monday morning on December 7, 2016 Greg Yeric of Arm gave an excellent and wide ranging plenary talk at IEDM entitled “Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?”. You can download Greg’s slide deck here.… Read More
NIGHTWATCH Smart Halter: A Great Example of ARM’s IoT Ecosystem Innovation And Diversity
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
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
AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification