Leadcore Technology Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of Datang Group, is a silicon success story from China. It recently made waves by snatching the baseband socket from Qualcomm in Xiaomi’s sub-$100 LTE smartphone Redmi 2A. Leadcore’s L1860C chipset included quad-core 1.5GHz CPU and Mali-T628MP2 GPU from ARM and LTE modem… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
How to Push Mobile to Use PCI Express?
By offering low-power PCI Express PHY solution for mobile application! To make it clear, we are not talking about Mobile Express (M-PCIe), but clearly about PCI Express protocol, including a PCIe Controller and a PCIe PHY. Initially developed to support internal connection between the CPU and the GPU in a PC, the technology has… Read More
NFV opens gate for ARM server stampede
A couple of years ago, our own Paul McLellan gave us a report on the 2013 Linley Microprocessor Conference with a provocative headline: “Server Shift to ARM Becomes a Stampede”, a title right off one of the Linley slides. 64-bit ARMv8 architecture was relatively new to the game, and ARM share in networking platforms was just a sliver… Read More
SemiWiki at #52DAC: Nominated for Best Paper Award!
Blogging for Semiwiki is a very good exercise to prepare a paper submission at DAC. Writing a short article using about 600 words to pass one message, and try to deliver this message as clearly as possible. Writing a paper for DAC is very similar, as you have to be synthetic and develop a thesis in 5 slides, no more, as it’s a time limited… Read More
How Sidense Sees The Smart Connected Universe
Sidenserecently conducted a webinar on what they call the Smart Connected Universe. They consider the Smart Connected Universe as something that includes a collection of market segments that are both smart and connected. This casts a big net, and includes what many are calling IoT, but goes further into medical, automotive and… Read More
MediaTek Breaks the ‘Core’ Barrier, Again
Who says Asian companies can’t innovate? Just look at how Taiwan’s MediaTek Inc. has conceived a 64-bit system-on-chip (SoC) that features 10 Cortex-A cores in a tri-cluster configuration. MediaTek’s Helio X20 processor is also the first mobile SoC that boasts ARM’s latest CPU and GPU cores. Moreover,… Read More
EDAC Game of Thrones: Bob Smith is the New Executive Director
Bob Smith has been appointed executive director of EDAC, following the retirement of Bob Gardner after nearly 20 years. Bob (Smith) was most recently the marketing and business development VP for Uniquify. However, he has been in the industry for a long time with stints at IKOS, Synopsys, LogicVision and Magma. He has even been … Read More
ARM A57 (A53) Virtualizer + IP Accelerated = ?
Hybrid IP Prototyping Kit from Synopsys!
Synopsys has launched IP Accelerated initiative last year. The goal was clearly to accelerate Time-To-Market by providing a complete set of “tools” to augment design productivity:
- IP Prototyping Kit with reference designs work out-of-the-box
- IP software development kits enable early
Is Low Power a Challenge? ICE-Grain Answers the Challenge
Blogs have limited wordcount so insert your own generic opening paragraph here about the importance of low power in IC design. Mention IoT and cloud datacenters for extra credit.
It is well-known that the biggest reductions in power come from changes at the architectural level. Tools and process can do some things and since they… Read More
Antifuse is the New Foundation of NVM Below 16nm
Today the non-volatile memory (NVM) foundation is the eFuse. It is typically available for free from the foundry and is the default choice because, like Mount Everest, it is there. However, like Mount Everest it is big. It is also power hungry and slow. eFuse solutions blow the silicide on the poly line creating a change in resistance.… Read More
Quantum Advantage is About the Algorithm, not the Computer