There is clearly a lot of hype about the Internet of Things (IoT) right now, but also it is clear that it will be a real market. In fact, it already is with various medical, fitness and home-appliance products already available. At CES in January, wearables was probably the biggest trend. That doesn’t always pan out (3D TV was… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
ISSCC 2014 SerDes Presentation
For those of you who missed the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference last month some of the presentations are now hitting the company websites. The theme of this year’s conference was SILICON SYSTEMS BRIDGING THE CLOUD:… Read More
Cadence and ARM BFF
The biggest market for semiconductors is mobile and an ARM processor is the center of the axle around which it revolves. So everyone in the mobile ecosystem needs to work closely with ARM. At CDNLive earlier this week Cadence and ARM announced that they are deepening their partnership. Most of what they announced makes it a lot easier… Read More
Intelligent Sensors
Wearables are clearly one of the hot areas of the Internet of Things (IoT). A big part of that market is sensors of one sort or another. Andes low power microprocessors are a good fit for this market which requires both 32 bit performance and ultra low power. Performance is needed since IoT by definition has internet access in some way… Read More
The (re)making of Arteris, 1-2-3
Success in a business with extended design-in cycles may look easy. In reality, there is a delicate balance between many factors. Some come to mind immediately: developing and releasing a good product in the first place; winning and keeping the right customers, not too few or too many; balancing investment between support and … Read More
Does Multiprotocol-PHY IP really boost TTM?
I have often written in Semiwiki about high speed PHY IP supporting Interface protocols (see for example this blog), the SoC cornerstone, almost as crucial as CPU, GPU or SDRAM Memory Controller. When you architect a SoC, you first select CPU(s) and/or GPU(s) to support the system basic functionality (Processor for Mobile application,… Read More
ARM Lab in a Box
St. Francis Xavier said “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” ARM is not going for them quite that young but this week they announced their “lab in a box” for participating universities worldwide. It is actually a joint launch between the ARM University Program (which is not new)… Read More
Sir Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies, Keynote!
Semiconductor IP is a focus of this year’s Design Automation conference and I’m excited to see a keynote by one of the leaders of this market segment. Even more interesting, Dr. Hossein Yassaie was knighted by the Queen in Her Majesty’s New Year Honours 2013. The award was given in recognition of his services to technology… Read More
Celebrating 50 Billion ARM Powered Chips!
In case you have not seen it yet there is a website named 50BillionChips where you can follow the journey of ARM. This goes quite well with the brief history of ARM we wrote last year in preparation for our bookFabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry. ARM was a big part of that transformation of course.… Read More
Yamaha Selecting Audio/Voice DSP Architecture?
…or Chongquing CYIT Communication Technology Co Ltd. Both of them have recently licensed the CEVA-TeakLite-4 DSP, the latest for its multi-mode wireless baseband chips targeting 4G terminals, including smartphones and tablets (CYIT) and Yamaha to address the need to run increasingly complex voice pre-processing algorithms,… Read More


Intel to Compete with Broadcom and Marvell in the Lucrative ASIC Business