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
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
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
Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me?
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
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
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet