Internet of Things, or Internet of Everything, is certainly the buzzword of the year. Does IoT describe one product family? Not really as the acronym describes a family of concepts, each of these concepts could effectively be turned into a family of products, if this concept reach the market, or fulfill a market need. Nevertheless… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
SecureCore: secure MPU for IoT
The evaluation of the number of connected (IoT) systems by 2020 varies depending on the source, but we should see in the range of 30 billion IoT devices by that date. We already know some of the basic requirements: such a device will have to be connected, low cost, ultra-low power and… secure. The first three are key enablers, but we … Read More
How Lucio Lanza Got Into EDA
Lucio Lanza is this year’s recipient of the Kaufman award. Unlike most recipients, Lucio worked closely with Phil Kaufman earlier in his career. I met with him at his office in Palo Alto to hear the story.
Even if you have never met him, it would be a reasonable guess from his name that Lucio Lanza is Italian. And you’d be right. He grew… Read More
MIPI Soundwire IP Sounds Innovative
MIPI SoundWire specification will be integrated into mobiles systems, like smartphone or media tablet. In fact some of the well-known chip makers have already decided to integrate MIPI SoundWire into their last application processor release. MIPI SoundWire is also the type of specification which could be used in many other … Read More
Linux and the ARC of the Coherent
Remember that thing called “real-time Linux”? Yeah, nobody else does either. As builds became configurable and clock speeds increased, embedded Linux manifested itself as fast enough for many applications – if a few other SoC details are addressed.
Most obvious for SoCs to run Linux is the need for a fully integrated MMU implementation.… Read More
Demler: Quad Core is Just For Marketing; Intel Will Not Succeed in Mobile
At Memcon today Mike Demler of the Linley Group (and coincidentally someone who used to work for me back at Cadence and who now run Memcon, small world) gave an interesting presentation on Trends in Mobile Processors. A mobile application processor (AP) is a highly integrated SoC to run the applications in a mobile device. Mostly… Read More
Did we forget non-volatile memory?
In our rush to shrink SoC nodes more and more to achieve better performance and more complex devices, we may have forgotten a passenger in the back seat: non-volatile memory. There has been little discussion of this in the pages of SemiWiki until now. Let’s give it a closer look.
Embedded flash has usually been associated with microcontrollers,… Read More
GPU Benchmarks? Try to See the Complete Picture…
We all know benchmarks, but do we really understand benchmark results? Benchmark users should always look beyond the simple score when making in-depth technical analysis and request to see all the facts. There are many graphics benchmarks to choose from but let’s name today these three below:
3DMark Ice Stormfrom Futuremark… Read More
NoC resilience protects end-to-end
Protecting memory with ECC but leaving the rest of an SoC uncovered is like having a guard dog chained up in the back corner of your yard. If the problem happens to be in that particular spot, it’ll be dealt with, otherwise there will be a lot of barking but little actual protection.
Similarly, adding a safety-capable processor like… Read More
CASPA, ARM and the Internet of Things
Today I was at the Chinese-American Semiconductor Professionals’ Association conference and dinner. Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, gave the dinner keynote. Somewhat surreally, it was in the same room in the same conference center two weeks ago that he gave they keynote at ARM TechCon. In another coincidence, Mike Muller of … Read More
The 2025 Semi Industry Forum: On the Road to a $1 Trillion Industry