I am at ARM TechCon today. One interesting presentation was made jointly between Samsung, Cadence and ARM themselves about developing physical libraries (ARM), a tool flow (Cadence) and test chips (Samsung). It was titled Samsung ARM and Cadence collaborate on the silicon-proven world first 14-nm FinFET Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
What you compress may not be all you get
Now that we’ve looked at the basics, we wrap up this three-part series exploring PVRTC texture compression. We’ll take a brief look at PVRTC2, the latest version of the technology, and then explore the issues behind visual quality from several different angles.
PVRTC2 is supported on the newest Series5XT or Series6 GPU cores from… Read More
Pigs Fly. Altera Goes with ARM on Intel 14nm
Altera announced in February that they would be using Intel as a foundry at 14nm. Historically they have used TSMC. Then in June they announced the Stratix 10 family of FPGAs that they would build on the Intel process. At the Globalpress summit in May I asked Vince Hu about their processor strategy. Here is what I wrote about itat the… Read More
Open Letter from Sonics to Arteris
I don’t remember seeing an open letter from one EDA or IP company to another until today. Sonics have published an open letter to Charlie Janac, the CEO of Arteris. What seems to have happened is that Arteris have sold their assets to Qualcomm and the development team (which is based in France) and several AEs are already Qualcomm… Read More
Let’s comment… a comment from Sonics (about Arteris)
We still don’t know the precise status about a potential acquisition of Arteris by Qualcomm, and I prefer not to comment a rumor and wait for the official announcement, if any. But I would like to comment … a comment about this rumor, recently made by Sonics. This comment has taken the form of an Open Letter, from “Grant Pierce, CEO of… Read More
Strategic Analog IP Power Management for SoCs
This tutorial describes how analog IP is becoming more important in any power management strategy and shows the major analog building blocks to manage power and temperature in a SoC on leading edge technology nodes.
The tremendous demand for high-performance computing devices has led to aggressive technology scaling, allowing… Read More
Qualcomm start selling DSP IP core?…
In recent times semiconductor companies have revealed their intentions to license their in-house processor architectures for the first time – IBM want to license their Power CPU architecture, nVidia to license their GPU architecture. Most recently, a rumor has surfed: Qualcomm will license their DSP architecture. We should… Read More
ARM Signs 48 New Licenses in Q3
ARM announced their quarterly results early this morning. ARM’s results are a funny mixture of backward looking information such as royalties which are reported a quarter late since they have to wait for their licensees to work out how many they shipped, and some very forward looking such as new licenses, which bring some… Read More
Server Shift to ARM Becomes a Stampede
I have been at the Linley Microprocessor Conference today. This is the one that is not about mobile: about servers, networking, base-stations. Probably the most important story about the whole industry is that the “shift to ARM becomes a stampede.”
In this market it seems to be driven by the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction… Read More
CEVA-XC Wireless Baseband Core
Eyal Bergman of CEVA announced their latest core yesterday at the Linley Microprocessor Conference. It’s their 4th generation CEVA-XC solution, which is the core of their offering for wireless baseband. It builds on 3 previous generations of CEVA-XC’s that were mainly targeted toward handset applications. This… Read More
Will 50% of New High Performance Computing (HPC) Chip Designs be Multi-Die in 2025?