At the beginning of December in Paris I had the opportunity to make a presentation to a very impressive audience, technical gurus from companies contributing to MIPI Alliance specification were here, including ST-Microelectronics, Intel, Qualcomm, TI, Toshiba, Nokia, Samsung, to name a few. … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Things to do in Denver when you’re 64-bit
When Apple announced last September their A7 chip had gone 64-bit, the congregation immediately swooned, but analysts reacted skeptically: “So what? Phones don’t need more memory, and there are no 64-bit apps.” Even pundits miss once in a while, and now the topic is how the chip industry is headed for 64-bit.… Read More
How to Develop Accurate Yet High Performance Models
In today’s environment of semiconductor design, SoCs are crammed with various IPs with multiple functionalities and processors integrated together. In such an event it has become necessary to model the system and verify on Virtual Platform before getting into actual design and fabrication. And that requires modelling of each… Read More
Migrating SOCs from 8051 to 32-bits
The 8051 processor has been widely used in many embedded applications over the past 30 years. While the 8051 core is small and simple-to-use, the newest generation of consumer electronics being developed today often require more than the 8051 MCU can reasonably deliver. New SOC applications such as flash drives, power management… Read More
Sidense Beats Kilopass in Court Again!
The technology headlines in 2013 were often stolen by frivolous legal actions that made little or no sense to me at all. Patent Trolling is at an all-time high inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem and as a result litigation reform is coming to Silicon Valley, believe it.
Currently working its way through the legislative process… Read More
Curved touchscreens
CES 2014 was the modern technology equivalent of the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, proving beyond any shadow of doubt displays no longer can be thought of as only flat. While the massive curved 105-inch TVs shown by LG and Samsung drew many gawkers, the implications of curved touch displays are even wider.… Read More
A Brief History of Andes Technology
I like to call Andes Technology the biggest microprocessor IP company you’ve never heard of. I wrote about themback in October when I sat down with them during the Linley Microprocessor Conference. Part of the reason you have never heard of them is that they are based in Taiwan and most of their business is in Taiwan and China.… Read More
Imagination’s New GPU Cores
This morning Imagination announced their latest GPU cores, including the world’s smallest fully-featured OpenGL ES3.0/OpenCL GPU core. More on that below. And it is the Internet…and graphics…so cats. Graphically rendered cats.
The first core is a a high end core new generation PowerVR Series6XT architecture… Read More
OpenVX Bring Power-efficient Vision Acceleration to Mobile
OpenVX is the next open source sample specification to be launched by Khronos group, a consortium building a family of interoperating APIs for portable and power efficient vision processing. If you take a look at the OpenVX participant list, you can check that the major chip makers: Broadcom, Qualcomm, TI, Intel, Nvidia, Renesas,… Read More
NoC, NoC: Your Chip May Be Under Attack
SoCs face a lot of issues related to security and the Network-on-Chip (NoC) is in a good position to facilitate system-wide services. SoCs are now so complex that one of the challenges is to make sure that the chip does what it is meant to do and doesn’t do what it isn’t meant to do. Just as in software, security used to be … Read More
Real men have fabs!