A very astute gentleman said to me a few years ago that he’d seen a lot of networking technology come and go – Token Ring, FDDI, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand – but the only one that held up over time was Ethernet.… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Interview with David Eggleston on Rambus-Unity CMOx
by Christie Marrian of ReRAM-Forum.com
Unity Semiconductor is a true veteran in the emerging memory/ReRAM field and was recently acquired by Rambus “one of the world’s premier technology licensing companies”. I must admit to being somewhat surprised by this acquisition when I first heard about it. Was this another example… Read More
CEVA also bid to acquire MIPS… ARM still staying quiet?
We have seen in a previous post that Imagination Technologies has proposed to buy MIPS, in fact “MIPS operating business and certain patent properties, as well as license rights to all of the remaining patent properties”. Translated into understandable language Imagination has offered $60M for MIPS Processor IP core portfolio,… Read More
Internet of Things, My Bluetooth Headset
A catchy phrase used by bloggers and journalists these days is “Internet of Things“, or IoT if you prefer acronyms. All of this is made possible by EDA tools in the hands of SoC designers to create useful products like my Jawbone ICON bluetooth headset. Tonight I discovered that I could customize my bluetooth headset… Read More
How much SRAM proportion could be integrated in SoC at 20 nm and below?
Once upon a time, ASIC designers were integrating memories in their design (using a memory compiler being part of the design tools provided by the ASIC vendor), then they had to make the memory observable, controllable… and start developing the test program for the function, not a very enthusiastic task (“AAAA” and “5555” and other… Read More
Here to make my stand, with a chipset in my hand
Yesterday, I clicked “like” on a LinkedIn post with the title “TI Cuts 1,700 Jobs”. Today, I read the analysis and pulled out Social Distortion’s “Still Alive” for inspiration. I’ve been through this more than once. For them it’s not like-worthy, and I feel their sting.
The part of the post I liked was the comment: “This is good for … Read More
Adesto Acquisition of Atmel Serial Flash: Strange Bedfellows?
On October 1, Adesto Technologies announced that it had acquired Atmel’s DataFlash and Serial Flash business groups. At first sight, this seemed a rather counter intuitive move for one of the most aggressive (and visible) companies in the emerging memory field. The purchase raised many questions to those, not least the moderator… Read More
Cadence sets the Global Standards in VIP for AMBA based SoC
We have shown in Semiwiki how strong Cadence position was in Verification IP (VIP) in a previous post focusing on Interface standards like SuperSpeed USB or PCI Express. But IP based functions are used everywhere in a SoC, not only to interface with the external world, and need to be verified, as well, like for AMBA based functions.… Read More
Carbon has Six Weeks of ARM, not to Mention Imagination and MIPS
As George E.P. Box said, “essentially all models are wrong but some are useful.” That is certainly the case with Carbon’s models. For processors they have two models, one that is fast (but not timing-accurate) and one that is accurate (but not fast). But both are useful.
Carbon attended the ARM TechCon in Santa… Read More
Did the MIPS acquisition just doom Vivante?
By now, you’ve probably read about the Imagination Technologies acquisition of MIPS somewhere, hopefully in the Eric Esteve article here. There’s an interesting side effect not being talked about much.… Read More
What is Wrong with Intel?