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
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
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
Is the IP market expected to decline by 2020?
To answer this question, I will share the results about Interface IP, more precisely the Top 5. The Top 5 protocols, USB, PCIe, Ethernet, DDRn and MIPI, are part of the interface IP market and each of them has been characterized by very strong growth rate. If you compute actual numbers for 2010 to 2014, it results to a Cumulated Annual… Read More
Why ARM Enabling Easy Access to Customized SOC’s Matters
The introduction of the Arduino heralded the huge growth and interest in MCU based designs by people who could never before easily put together the hardware and software system required for implementation of their ideas. I remember the first time I saw the Arduino in use. I was at a talk on how a system for controlling propane jet solenoids… Read More
Optimizing Quality-of-Service in a Network-on-Chip Architecture
The Linley Group is well-known for their esteemed Microprocessor Report publication, now in its 28th year. Accompanying their repertoire of industry reports, TLG also sponsors regular conferences, highlighting the latest developments in processor architecture and implementation.
One of the highlights of the conference… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet