If I had to sum up opening day at ARM TechCon 2013 in one word it would be “crowded”. More than twice as many people attended as last year with 6,500 preregistered. The opening keynote was “The New Style of IT” pimping the HP Moonshot systems, but it could have just as easily been called “Why Intel Stock is Dead Money”,… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Qualcomm and Arteris: the CEO Speaks
Arteris finally announced this morning, as rumored, that Qualcomm is acquiring “certain technology assets” and hired personnel formerly employed by Arteris. The financial terms were not disclosed.
I talked to Charlie Janac, the CEO, today. The first thing I asked him is why such a convoluted deal, I’ve never… Read More
Qualcomm Arteris deal
Is it really a surprise if Qualcomm, the undisputed leader of Application Processor (AP) and BaseBand (BB) IC for wireless mobile, already one of the Arteris investors (with ARM, Synopsys, Docomo Capital and a bunch of VC), eventually acquires the best NoC IP technology (the technology, the engineering team and the rights, but… Read More
ARM in Samsung 14nm FinFET
I am at ARM TechCon today. One interesting presentation was made jointly between Samsung, Cadence and ARM themselves about developing physical libraries (ARM), a tool flow (Cadence) and test chips (Samsung). It was titled Samsung ARM and Cadence collaborate on the silicon-proven world first 14-nm FinFET Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and… Read More
What you compress may not be all you get
Now that we’ve looked at the basics, we wrap up this three-part series exploring PVRTC texture compression. We’ll take a brief look at PVRTC2, the latest version of the technology, and then explore the issues behind visual quality from several different angles.
PVRTC2 is supported on the newest Series5XT or Series6 GPU cores from… Read More
Pigs Fly. Altera Goes with ARM on Intel 14nm
Altera announced in February that they would be using Intel as a foundry at 14nm. Historically they have used TSMC. Then in June they announced the Stratix 10 family of FPGAs that they would build on the Intel process. At the Globalpress summit in May I asked Vince Hu about their processor strategy. Here is what I wrote about itat the… Read More
Open Letter from Sonics to Arteris
I don’t remember seeing an open letter from one EDA or IP company to another until today. Sonics have published an open letter to Charlie Janac, the CEO of Arteris. What seems to have happened is that Arteris have sold their assets to Qualcomm and the development team (which is based in France) and several AEs are already Qualcomm… Read More
Let’s comment… a comment from Sonics (about Arteris)
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
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


TSMC Formally Sues Ex-SVP Over Alleged Transfer of Trade Secrets to Intel