ARM announced their Q1 results yesterday. Having just written that Intel lost $1B in mobile, I guess I could have used the title “ARM didn’t lose $1B in mobile.” They made $100M (on revenues of $300M). So let’s start off with what their results actually were and then look at what other things of interest … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Welcome, LPDDR4!
Thanks to memory controller expert Marc Greenberg, Marketing Director for DDRn Controller IP with Synopsys, for this post “Qualcomm announces first application processor with LPDDR4 capability”. According with Marc, this Application Processor, the Snapdragon 810, is “the first product that I’m aware of that will use LPDDR4… Read More
On-chip Firewall
We have had the Snowden revelations that the NSA has gone rogue, Target lost a zillion credit cards, the Heartbleed bug meaning that main security protocol of the internet had been coded up wrong for a couple of years, theft of records from RSA and more. One result is that people do not completely trust a security system that depends… Read More
NVM central to multi-layer trust in cloud
Pop quiz: Name one of the hottest applications for non-volatile memory – A) processor and code configuration; B) RFID tags; C) secure encryption keys; D) all the above. The answer is D, but not in the way you may be thinking; a new approach is using all these ideas at once, combined in SoC designs targeting advanced security … Read More
Sensor clusters at edge call for NoCs nearby
In his recent blog on EETimes, Kurt Shuler of Arteris took a whimsical look at the hype surrounding the IoT, questioning the overall absence of practicality and a seemingly misplaced focus on use cases at the expense of a coherent architecture. I don’t think it is all that bleak, but when it comes to architecture, Kurt is right, and… Read More
Does Processor IP still get the Lion’s share in 2013?
I think that the answer is pretty obvious, but the interesting point is to figure out which processor type, and which part of revenues, up-front license or royalties? One of my customers, let’s call him Mr. X, ask me to clarify this point. Mr. X has bought the excellent report from Gartner “Market Share: Semiconductor Design Intellectual… Read More
Will IoT Drive the Next Semiconductor Revolution?
To further my quest to comprehend the latest trends in the semiconductor industry continues, I spent the morning with SEMI at the “The Silicon Valley Breakfast Forum: Internet of Things (IoT) – Driving the Microelectronics Revolution” seminar. I’m a big fan of the breakfast seminar concept. I’m up early anyway and it is … Read More
4G shalt thou not count, neither count thou 2G
Five years from now, what will be the leading mobile connectivity standard? If you said 4G, please report to the brainwashing remediation center nearest you immediately. 3G is not only here to stay for the long haul, it’s growing – and will quickly become the preferred choice for M2M deployments.… Read More
How Qualcomm crushed the mobile roadmap
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 announcement this week may seem like just another mondo-core SoC on a way-cool TSMC 20nm advanced process. Looking past the technology shows an understated genius in creating a roadmap – and why yours and most everyone else’s probably sucks.… Read More
Sonics Performance Monitor and Hardware Trace
As SoCs have got more complex, and with a larger and larger software content, it is no longer good enough to just monitor how the design behaves using simulation and then completely forget about it once the design is complete. What is required is the capability to monitor the design in real time (in silicon or FPGA) to see how it is behaving.… Read More
Intel to Compete with Broadcom and Marvell in the Lucrative ASIC Business