If you have purchased a high-end cell-phone or tablet in the last couple of years it probably has LTE, although some carriers try and blur things by showing a symbol like 4G when you are in an area that has LTE despite the fact that your phone does not support it. Don’t you love cell-phone marketing? Talking of which, if a camel … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Low Cost Smartphones: How Do They Do It For $50?
The future growth in smartphones is largely going to be at the low end of the market as Eric wrote about here a couple of weeks ago. A lot of that growth is targeted at China. Sitting in the US it is easy to underestimate the size of the Chinese market. China Mobile (the market leader) is just one company but has more than twice the number … Read More
Qualcomm Video Friday
Two videos (both short) from Qualcomm. They are both amusing but also have a serious aspect to them. The first one is interesting since it is Qualcomm following in Intel’s footsteps with its “Intel Inside” campaign against AMD to make people care about what processor was in their PC. Until that point probably… Read More
Intel’s Q2 Conference Call
Yesterday was Intel’s Q2 conference call. I think that there are some interesting little pieces of information. The financials were what analysts expected although they did take down their guidance for the rest of the year. But that is never the interesting point of Intel conference calls (they almost always hit guidance).… Read More
“NoC, NoC” – Are You Listening to nVidia’s Dally?
Recently Bill Dally, nVidia’s Chief Scientist & SVP of Research, and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University, has been out speaking quite a bit including a “short keynote” at the Design Automation Conference and a keynote at ISC 2013. The DAC audience is primarily EDA tool users and… Read More
Intel Benchmark Hoax!
To be fair, cheating on CPU benchmarks is not new, so if you haven’t followed the computer industry for the past 30 years you might be surprised by Intel cheating, but I’m certainly not. Back in the day I worked for Data General and we “creatively” benchmarked against the Digital Equipment VAX all day long. There are different types… Read More
How to reduce routing congestion in large Application Processor SoC?
Application Processor SoC integrates more and more functions, generation after generation, challenging performance, cost, power efficiency, reliability, and time-to-market. But the maximum die size can’t increase, at least because of the constraints linked with wafer production, manufacturability, yield and finally… Read More
Interview with Arasan
Recently I had a chance to chat with Arasan Ganesan, CEO at Arasan Chip Systems in San Jose, CA. Arasan Chip Systems has provided Silicon interface IP and supporting hardware and software to the semiconductor industry for more than 15 years. The headquarters are in San Jose and engineering offices in Bangalore and Tuticorin, India.… Read More
Should an IP vendor become a PHY IP Dealer?
This is not a theoretical question. Imagine that you are developing and selling digital IP, like Interface Controller, PCI Express or USB 2.0 or 3.0, or MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) or Display Serial Interface (DSI). If you look at companies like Synopsys, they have built their success on the “Integrated Interface IP” concept.… Read More
Smartphone Shipment Explosion Sustained by $50-$75 devices, Mostly in China
Until recently, talking about smartphone incredible shipment growth was understood as shipments of A5 iPhone or Galaxy Note, and this was true. Devices priced at $500 or more are shipping like baguette in Paris, but this fact is only true in Europe, Korea, Japan or USA. Does that means that people living populated countries like… Read More
Will 50% of New High Performance Computing (HPC) Chip Designs be Multi-Die in 2025?