Cameras are becoming ubiquitous thanks to a new wave of applications that span GoPro for sports, smart glass for the Internet eyewear, ADAS for car safety, and more. However, while these cameras boast an increasing amount of megapixels to enhance the quality of vision, what they increasingly need is more processing power to analyze… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Simply the Highest Performing Cortex-M MCU
If you target high growth markets like wearable (Sport Watches, Fitness Bands, Wearable medical) industrial (mPOS, Telematics, etc.) or Smart Appliances, you expect using a power efficient MCU delivering high DMIPs count. We are talking about systems requiring a low Bill of Material (BoM) both in term of cost and devices count.… Read More
IoT Sensor Node Designs Call for Highly Integrated Flows
Applications for IoT sensors are becoming more sophisticated, especially for industrial usage. Building optimal sensors for different applications requires multi-domain design, optimization and verification flows. The sensor devices are usually MEMS, and as such have electrical properties that need to be tailored to … Read More
The PTAB Inter Partes Review process: Danger, Will Robinson
Companies with significant investment in their patent portfolios have recently faced a harsh reality: their intellectual property has become a collection of paper with large targets on them. Taking aim is the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trials and Appeal Board (PTAB), and recent figures on dismissed claims shows… Read More
32-bit MCUs Way to Go for IoT
Cost, power and performance, and security are the fundamental ingredients of chip development for the Internet of Things (IoT) market and that 32-bit microcontrollers are a way forward to meet these basic requirements. That was the crux of the message from the webinar held by Andes Technology Corp. on February 10, 2015.
You can… Read More
Arteris Adds Functional Safety to NoC
Arteris Inc.has joined hands with Yogitech S.p.A. to help automotive system-on-chip (SoC) designers meet the required functional safety metrics and obtain the ISO 26262 certification for automotive safety integrity levels (ASIL) in the least possible time.
Arteris—which provides network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP… Read More
ARM 2014 Results: 12 Billion Cores
Last week was the ARM earnings call, giving the Q4 results and a summary of 2014. 12B chips containing ARM processors were shipped last year which has meant that they have grown in all their major end-markets: mobile, embedded intelligence, and enterprise infrastructure. Almost half of those 12B chips were in mobile, around 5.6B.… Read More
Do You Need a Silicon Catalyst?
Lately there has been significant concern over the rising costs of designing in silicon and the troubling decline in venture investments in semiconductors. These alarming trends include fewer IPOs, a falloff in the amount and frequency of early stage seed investments, and comparatively low industry organic growth rates. A … Read More
Using NoCs to Reduce Power
Earlier this week I moderated a webinar at Sonics entitled NoC 102: Using SonicsGN to Address Low Power Requirements. Drew Wingard, the CTO of Sonics, presented it. It goes without saying that power is a major concern in SoC design, not just with chips for battery powered devices but also tethered devices. A major cost of ownership… Read More
Open Forum for Semiconductor Professionals!
The semiconductor industry has never been more exciting than it is today, at least not in my 30 years of experience. Things are moving faster than ever before making collaboration at all levels a requirement. At SemiWiki we are afforded the privilege of passes to semiconductor conferences around the world. We also have access to… Read More
TSMC vs Intel Foundry vs Samsung Foundry 2026