Tim Cook’s strategy to disengage from Samsung as a supplier of LCDs, memory and processors while simultaneously creating a worldwide supply chain from the remnants of former leaders like Sharp, Elpida, Toshiba and soon Intel is remarkable in its scope and breadth. By 2014, Apple should have in place a supply chain for 500M iOS devices… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
A Brief History of the MIPS Architecture
MIPS is one of the most prolific, longest-living industry-standard processor architectures, existing in numerous incarnations over nearly three decades.
MIPS has powered products including game systems from Nintendo and Sony; DVRs from Dish Network, EchoStar and TiVo; set-top boxes from Cisco and Motorola; DTVs from Samsung… Read More
Subsystem IP, myth or reality?
I have participated to a panel during IP-SoC, I must say that “Subsystem IP, myth or Reality” was a great moment. The panel was a mix of mid-size IP vendor (CAST, Sonics), one large EDA (Martin Lund from Cadence), Semiwiki blogger and one large IDM (Peter Hirt from STM) who has very well represented the customer side. And, to make the… Read More
A Brief History of the Fabless Semiconductor Ecosystem
Clearly the fabless semiconductor ecosystem is driving the semiconductor industry and is responsible for both the majority of the innovation and the sharp decline in consumer electronics costs we have experienced. By definition, a fabless semiconductor company does not have to spend the time and money on manufacturing related… Read More
Don’t miss this Panel! Platform & Subsystem IP: Trends and Realities
If you pass by Grenoble tomorrow (Tuesday 4th Dec.) and go to IP-SoC 2012, then you should attend this panel at 4pm in the Auditorium (you can’t miss it, it’s the larger room at the registration level).
If you are Designer, Architect, Project Manager, Marketing… working for a chip maker, please prepare questions!… Read More
Arteris answer to Sonics: should compare actual NoC (in Silicon proven SoC) performance, instead of potential, unproven NoC performances!
It seems that Ateris vs. Sonics war, initiated by Sonics in 2010 on the legal battle field, is now continuing on the marketing field, as far as I am concerned, I prefer the latter, as I am an engineer and not a lawyer, and I must say that playing in the marketing allow both companies to extract the most attractive features of their products.… Read More
Give me a pair of wires, I’ll give you Ethernet in cars
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
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
Will 50% of New High Performance Computing (HPC) Chip Designs be Multi-Die in 2025?