It’s rare that we find a truly Indian-based company operating globally in the semiconductor space. Although the ‘gold rush’ towards IP development in the last decade initiated many IP start-ups in India, today we rarely find Indian IP company names which are shining in the global arena. The story of services companies is different,… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
IoT Security: Your Refrigerator Attacks!
Every time I see a presentation on IoT the forecast for the number of devices in 2020 seems to go up by a few billion. But behind the hype there are clearly going to be a large number of devices on (and even in) our bodies, our homes and cars. Not to mention in factories and workplaces. IoT devices cover a wide spectrum. Realtors like to expand… Read More
GPP, GPU or Embedded Vision Dedicated Processor?
Before answering the question we should try to define what is behind “Vision”, which type of applications and evaluate this heterogeneous market weight. Embedded Vision (EV) is the use of computer vision in embedded systems to interpret meaning from image or video. In fact vision processing requires a lot of maths functions that… Read More
Archives from TI’s Baseband Glory – Part 1
In 1992, nearly two years after Britain’s Acorn Computers joined hands with Apple and VLSI to create Advanced RISC Machines or ARM, the semiconductor upstart landed its first major licensing breakthrough. In retrospect, while Apple’s Newton handheld computer had played a key role in creating the ARM venture, Texas… Read More
US is the Ultimate Leader in Semiconductor Business
Last year in November when I looked at the world’s top20 semiconductor companies with Samsungand TSMCbeing at the second and third rank respectively, first being Intel, I computed the sales numbers of the companies based on their countries and found that Taiwan and South Korea accounted for 34.5% of the total sales of the top20 … Read More
Security All Around in SoCs at DAC
Last month I was on my way to write a detailed article on important aspects to look at while designing an SoC. This was important in the new context of modern SoCs that go much beyond the traditional power, performance and area (PPA) requirements. I had about 12-13 parameters in my list that I couldn’t cover in one go, so I put the write-up… Read More
Qualcomm LTE Modem Competitors? Samsung, Intel, Mediatek, Spreadtrum, Leadcore… or simply CEVA!
What is common between the 4G LTE modems from Samsung, Intel, Mediatek, Spreadtrum or Leadcore? All these chips are architecture with CEVA XC4000 family supporting 4G LTE-Advanced, LTE, HSPA/+, W-CDMA, TD-SCDMA, and legacy GSM/GPRS/EDGE. Samsung organization is vertical, the company design and manufacture DRAM, NAND and… Read More
DAC Keynotes: Mark Your Calendar
DAC starts in San Francisco on June 8th. The kickoff keynote at 9.20am that morning is by Brian Otis of Google. He is a director at Google[x]. According to Wikipedia:Google X, stylized as Google[x], is a semi-secret facility run by Google dedicated to making major technological advancements. It is located about a half mile from … Read More
embARC for a Free Ride
It’s probably the first time that Synopsys is offering such a direct access to free and open source software. The goal is to support customers developing application code for IoT and embedded devices based on ARC IP core family. The designer can select the Real Time Operating System (RTOS) which best meet the system requirements,… Read More
CEVA Eyes DSP Scale in China’s $65 LTE Handsets
China Mobile’s bid to go for 3-mode Long-Term Evolution (LTE) has led to the first major breakthrough, $65 LTE handsets, and here baseband and application processors provided by chipmakers like Leadcore Technology, MediaTek and Spreadtrum Communications have all one thing in common: DSP cores from CEVA Inc.
The advent… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet