We still don’t know the precise status about a potential acquisition of Arteris by Qualcomm, and I prefer not to comment a rumor and wait for the official announcement, if any. But I would like to comment … a comment about this rumor, recently made by Sonics. This comment has taken the form of an Open Letter, from “Grant Pierce, CEO of… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Strategic Analog IP Power Management for SoCs
This tutorial describes how analog IP is becoming more important in any power management strategy and shows the major analog building blocks to manage power and temperature in a SoC on leading edge technology nodes.
The tremendous demand for high-performance computing devices has led to aggressive technology scaling, allowing… Read More
Qualcomm start selling DSP IP core?…
In recent times semiconductor companies have revealed their intentions to license their in-house processor architectures for the first time – IBM want to license their Power CPU architecture, nVidia to license their GPU architecture. Most recently, a rumor has surfed: Qualcomm will license their DSP architecture. We should… Read More
ARM Signs 48 New Licenses in Q3
ARM announced their quarterly results early this morning. ARM’s results are a funny mixture of backward looking information such as royalties which are reported a quarter late since they have to wait for their licensees to work out how many they shipped, and some very forward looking such as new licenses, which bring some… Read More
Server Shift to ARM Becomes a Stampede
I have been at the Linley Microprocessor Conference today. This is the one that is not about mobile: about servers, networking, base-stations. Probably the most important story about the whole industry is that the “shift to ARM becomes a stampede.”
In this market it seems to be driven by the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction… Read More
CEVA-XC Wireless Baseband Core
Eyal Bergman of CEVA announced their latest core yesterday at the Linley Microprocessor Conference. It’s their 4th generation CEVA-XC solution, which is the core of their offering for wireless baseband. It builds on 3 previous generations of CEVA-XC’s that were mainly targeted toward handset applications. This… Read More
Putting the Ten in Tensilica
Chris Rowen of Cadence’s Tensilica announced the tenth generation of the Xtensa customizable processor at the Linley Microprocessor Conference yesterday. Chris was one of the founders of Tensilica…back in 1997. I believe that the first version was released in 1999. Over the years the Tensilica business changed.… Read More
GSA hosting “Interface IP: Winners, Losers in 2013” from IPnest
The GSA IP Working Group will meet today in San Jose, and the Group has asked IPnest building a presentation dedicated to Interface IP. The timing was perfect, as I have just completed the “Interface IP Survey” version 5, and I was able to use fresh market data. The IP working group will discover the IP vendor ranking, protocol by protocol,… Read More
Andes: the Biggest Microprocessor IP Company You’ve Never Hear Of
I wrote in April about Andes Technology, a microprocessor IP licensing company that even the person sitting next to me, a strategic marketing guy from Qualcomm had never heard of. So, OK, if you read that earlier article you had at least heard of them.
Part of the reason you haven’t heard of them is that they are in Taiwan (in Hsinchu)… Read More
Enter the Warrior
Since Imagination’s acquisition of MIPS at the end of last year, the MIPS product line has been given a new lease of life. There are two things driving this. The first is simply that with its new home, the MIPS architecture has a solid future whereas before it was uncertain. Secondly, Imagination moved their own general purpose… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot