If you take a look at the explosion of the Mobile segment, linked with the fantastic world-wide adoption of smartphone and media tablet, you clearly see that the SC industry evolution during –at least- the next five years will be intimately correlated with the mobile segments. Not really a surprise, but the question I would like … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Software Driven Power Analysis
Power is a fundamentally hard problem. When you have finished the design, you have accurate power numbers but can’t do anything about them. At the RTL level you have some power information but it is often too late to make major architectural changes (add an offload audio-processor, for example). Early in the design, making… Read More
Help, my IP has fallen and can’t get up
We’ve been talking about the different technologies for FPGA-based SoC prototyping a lot here in SemiWiki. On the surface, the recent stories all start off pretty much the same: big box, Xilinx Virtex-7, wanna go fast and see more of what’s going on in the design. This is not another one of those stories. I recently sat down with Mick… Read More
Design team in China also lead Network-on-Chip adoption…
I have mentioned NoC adoption explosion during the last two years, illustrated by the huge growth in revenue of a company like Arteris: if we consider only revenue coming from upfront license sales (not including royalties), Arteris growth has been geometric between 2011 and 2010, passing from 18 to 39 customers, which is more … Read More
High Performance or Cycle Accuracy? You can have both
SoC designers have always wanted to simulate hardware and software together during new product development, so one practical question has been how to trade off performance versus accuracy when creating an early model of the hardware. The creative minds at Carbon Design Systems and ARM have combined to offer us some hope and relief… Read More
Apple Makes More on iPhone Than Samsung on Everything
Apple’s stock is down 10% after they announced “disappointing” results. They are only disappointing in the sense that some analysts expected even bigger profits. At $13.08 billion it is the largest quarterly profit for any corporation that is not in the oil business ever. According to wikipedia, even the … Read More
A Brief History of Sidense
Sidense Corp. is a leading developer of embedded non-volatile memory (NVM) intellectual property (IP) for the semiconductor IC market. The company is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, and has a global presence with sales offices worldwide.
The company was founded in 2004 by CTO Wlodek Kurjanowicz, a MoSys fellow and co-founder… Read More
How to manage decreasing by 70% a $5B IC business in less than 6 years? TI knows the answer…
The Wireless Business Unit (WBU) from TI was created in the mid 90’s to structure the chip business in wireless handset made with customers like Nokia, Ericsson or Alcatel. I had a deep look at the WBU results: quickly growing from $1B in 2000 to reach about $5B in 2005… to finally decrease by 70%, down to $1.3B in 2012.
Let’s make it clear:… Read More
The Linley Microprocessor Conference: Weather Cloudy
The Linley Group’s Microprocessor conference in Spring is focused on Datacenters now that cloud computing and massive internal datacenters has made them so important. The conference is on February 5th and 6th. It is free to qualified people such as network equipment vendors, network service providers and so on (which … Read More
New PCI Express 3.0 Equalization Requirements
PCI Express 3.0 increased the supported data rate to 8 Gbps, which effectively doubles the data rate supported by PCI Express 2.0. While the data rate was increased, no improvement was made to the channels. As such, an 8 Gbps channel in PCIe 3.0 experiences significantly more loss than one implemented in PCIe 2.0. To compensate for… Read More
Intel’s Death Spiral Took Another Turn