With a well-chronicled share inside cellular baseband interfaces for mobile devices, one might think that is the entire CEVA story, especially going into Mobile World Congress 2014 this week. MWC is still a phone show, but is becoming more and more about the Internet of Things and wearables, and CEVA and its ecosystem are showing… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
A Brief History of Kandou Bus
Kandou Bus uses a novel form of spatial coding to transmit data between wired chips. The main idea is to introduce correlations between the signals sent on the interface, and choose the correlations judiciously to lower the power consumption, increase the speed, and lower the footprint. It is a generalization of differential … Read More
6 reasons Synopsys covets C/C++ static analysis
By now, you’ve probably seen the news on Synopsys acquiring Coverity, and a few thoughts from our own Paul McLellan and Daniel Payne in commentary, who I respect deeply – and I’m guessing there are many like them out there in the EDA community scratching their heads a little or a lot at this. I’m not from corporate, but I am here… Read More
$1 Billion IP & VIP sales by 2017?
We are not talking about ARM Ltd., as the IP vendor has already passed the $1B sales in 2013. In fact, we are not talking about a single IP vendor; this $1B mark will be passed by two IP market segments: Interface and Verification IP. In fact these two segments are very close together. When an IP is developed to support a specific Interface… Read More
Smart cards hard for the US to figure out?
Every once in a while, I just scratch my head and wonder just what in the wide, wide world of tech is going on. More than ever, it seems the big barriers to adoption aren’t a lack of technology – instead, barriers come from a system that staunchly defends the old way of doing things, even when the participants are battered, broken, and … Read More
HDMI, DisplayPort, MHL IPs + Engineering Team = Good Move
This news is certainly not as amazing that the acquisition of MIPS by Imagination, or Arteris by Qualcomm… but it shows that Cadence is building a complete Interface IP port-folio, brick after brick. The result will be that a complete wall is being built on the Synopsys road to monopoly and complete success on Interface IP market.… Read More
Power Control Moving into Hardware
Sonics have been building networks-on-chips (NoCs) for a long time and have amassed a rich patent portfolio. So being granted a new one isn’t usually deemed press-release-worthy. However, their latest patent on power management is pretty significant. It is patent 8,601,288 titled “Intelligent Power Controller”.
Historically… Read More
ISO 26262 driving away from mobile SoCs
Connected cars may be starting to resemble overgrown phones in many ways, but there are critical differences now leading processor teams in a different direction away from the ubiquitous mobile SoC architecture – in turn causing designers to reevaluate interconnect strategies.
The modern car has evolved into a microcontroller… Read More
Migrating to Andes from 8051
The 8051 microcontroller has been around for years…decades in fact. It was originally developed in 1980 by Intel. Back then it required 12 clock cycles per instruction but modern cores use just one. While it is still widely used, mostly as an IP core for SoCs, it is running out of steam despite running over 50 times faster than… Read More
ASTC and the new midrange ARM Mali-T720 GPU
When we last visited texture compression technology for OpenGL ES on mobile GPUs, we mentioned Squish image quality results in passing, but weren’t able to explore a key technology at the top of the results. With today’s introduction of the ARM Mali-T720 GPU IP, let’s look at the texture compression technology inside: Adaptive… Read More
Why NA is Not Relevant to Resolution in EUV Lithography