When I started collecting my list of EDA mergers and acquisitions about 30 years ago, my objective was simply to determine the number of logos each EDA company owns. For that reason, I collected all the fish-eat-fish-eat-fish…. mergers and acquisitions, going way back to the very early days of EDA (even before it was called EDA).… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
From ARM7 to such a Large CPU cores Port-Folio
I have heard about ARM processor for the very first time in 1990, when I was interviewed by ES2 Design Center manager before being hired to subcontract an ASIC design for ES2. I don’t know why, but I remember very well that he told me about two of the ES2 partners: ARM as a processor IP core provider and TSMC as a Foundry partner if, by chance,… Read More
MIMO, Always On, 3D Imaging and Computer Vision…
You can read all these articles in the latest CEVA Newsletter, if you didn’t read it first in Semiwiki! The blog describing the “Maximum Likelihood MIMO Implementation” is certainly going deep technically, as it introduce a complex Digital Signal Processing technique, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). MIMO is just like… Read More
Sonics and Qualcomm Make a Deal
Some background. Sonics has been in the network-on-chip (NoC) business for a long time. Nearly 18 years years. When Arteris launched their products, Sonics figured Arteris were infringing Sonics’s patents and in 2011 brought a complaint against them. Details are here. Arteris looked at a couple of their own patents (if… Read More
So Easy To Learn VIP Integration into UVM Environment
It goes without saying that VIPs really play a Very Important Part in SoC verification today. It has created a significant semiconductor market segment in the fabless world of SoC and IP design & verification. In order to meet the aggressive time-to-market for IPs and SoCs, it’s imperative that readymade VIPs which are proven… Read More
A song of optimization and reuse
If you hang around engineers for any time at all, the word optimization is bound to come up. The very definition of engineer is to contrive or devise a solution. With that anointing, most engineers are beholden to the idea that their job is creating, synthesizing, and perfecting a solution specifically for the needs of a unique situation.… Read More
PCI Express 4 specification just released for PCI-SIG DevCon
I have been alerted by a blog from Moshik Rubin from Cadence: PCI-SIG has finally released the PCIe 4.0 rev 0.3 specification for members’ review, on time for the PCI-SIG developers conference last June in Santa Clara. Since the early days of PCI Express in 2005, Denali (at that time, now Cadence) has positioned the PCIe VIP… Read More
I’ll be with you in a second
One aspect of always-on is power conservation, being able to respond to events without having a device constantly in full-power mode. This month, the announcement of the Amazon Fire Phone and details revealed about the Google Android Wear SDK suggest another important dimension: the competitive advantage of rapid, frictionless… Read More
ARC EM DSP supports Always-on Devices
The ARC EM family is the low-power, embedded and low footprint processor part of the larger ARC processor. To target the ultra low-power markets like wearable and IoT, Synopsys has added DSP capabilities to EM5D and EM7D. To be specific, these cores are optimized for ultra low-power control and DSP, thanks to:
- Energy-efficient
Getting the best from a Radio Spectrum: MIMO
Exchanging data through wireless network is that we are doing every day, every hour if not every minute. Not only we use our smartphone to discuss or exchange Emails, but also to download, or upload, massive amounts of data. Thus, the radio spectrum has become to be busy, and is an expansive piece for carriers. Optimizing this radio… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet