Interesting news today : Lattice Semiconductor, FPGA vendor is buying Silicon Image. In fact, Silicon Image is a chip vendor, but also an innovator, licensing well known IP like HDMI, MHL and more. If we consider the amount paid for Silicon Image ($600 million), compared with the last full year revenue, $276M in 2014, that’s a 2.2X… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Customizable IP for HP and LP Audio Subsystems
Today, Smartphones and mobile devices have become center of innovation with multiple functions getting into them. Considering the audio or voice application, there can be multi-way conferencing, video chat, complete audio/video streaming, gaming, voice triggering and recognition,… you name an application, and it will … Read More
HiFi Sounds Better than Ever
If you think that the sound atmosphere created by Dolby or Surround–sound audio is the best you can achieve today by using complexes algorithms on DSP, like I thought before knowing about “Object-Based Audio”, you must read these lines! In fact Surround-sound Audio is limited by the number of speakers installed in a room, or a car,… Read More
Twelve Years of Sonics at Toshiba
Sonics announced today that Toshiba has completed the SoC design using Sonics’ on-chip network IP for its new TZ2100 group of application processors. The TZ2100 group of applications processors are the newest addition to Toshiba’s ApP Lite (Application Processor Lite) TZ2000 series. With this group of ApP Lite devices, sound… Read More
Prototyping Kits to Accelerate IP Development & Integration into SoCs
With growing SoC size, complexity, software and hardware content in it and shrinking time-to-market, the SoC design completion in time has become increasingly dependent on IP which need to be sourced (internally or externally), customized according to the design need and integrated together into the SoC. While IP providers… Read More
Secure Microprocessors the Andes Way
Microprocessor vendors such as Andes have been saying for some time that security requires extensive hardware support. In particular, embedded processors in intelligent sensors inside IoT chips are now popular targets for hackers, who find it easy to change the program code and system parameters to alter the operation of the… Read More
Facts Support New Emergence in Semiconductor Landscape
As we left an exciting year 2014 which is poised to record 7+ % increase in semiconductor revenue (~ $338 B) compared to 2013 (~ $315 B) and entered into another promising year 2015 for semiconductors, I looked back over the year bygone and collected inferences from some of the major important events which clearly convey how 2015 can… Read More
Last VIP News of 2014
It’s likely that most of the current Semiwiki readers didn’t read this article posted in 2011, comparing Cadence and Synopsys with the Soviet Union and the USA, sharing the world in 1944 during the Yalta Conference. I was explaining in my post that Synopsys’s strong influence was on Design IP when Cadence’s preferred domain was … Read More
ASIC Days Are Here Again
Technology often goes in cycles. Thirty years ago the dominant mode of computing was a shared computing resource with comparatively dumb terminals. Think of a Vax accessed by terminals. Then workstations and the PC came along and the dominant mode became a computer on everyone’s desk. Then the smartphone came along and … Read More
Lead, follow, or catch the next Silicon Valley wave
What does the IoT mean for the next wave of Silicon Valley innovators? Looking at the previous waves of semiconductor economic development and the doctrine of “creative destruction” holds clues as to how this one develops and who emerges as the new leaders.
Given seven decades of progress, it may seem semiconductor firms on top … Read More
The 2025 Semi Industry Forum: On the Road to a $1 Trillion Industry