I’ve often wanted to publish a book with nothing but photos of police cars, so that people wouldn’t have to slow down and gawk at them when they have someone pulled over on the side of the freeway. Intel roadmaps seem to have the same effect on people. No matter what is on them, even if there’s nothing really new, they… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Yalta is Dead! Synopsys offensive in VIP restart the cold war
Last year, you could claim (like I did in this blog) that Cadence was making money with large VIP port-folio, when Synopsys was managing sales of a large Design IP port-folio (thanks to a successful acquisition strategy in the 2000’s). But the latest acquisitions made by Synopsys of VIP centric companies like nSys or ExpertIO should… Read More
Universal Flash Storage: Webinar
There has been a general trend for over a decade now towards the use of very fast serial interfaces instead of wide parallel interfaces. This has been driven by a number of different factors ranging from the lack of pins on an SoC, the difficulty of keeping wide parallel interfaces free of skew, limitations on printed circuit board… Read More
PLL Design Challenges for Integrated Circuit Designs
Nandu Bhagwan is CEO of GHz Circuits and has been designing PLL circuits used in ICs for the past 12 years. Mr. Bhagwan did a video interview with John Pierce of Cadence to talk about the challenges of PLL design.… Read More
Smartphones and Tablets Thirst for Bandwidth!
The explosive growth in portable devices over the past decade has left manufactures in a quandary over how to add memory to their products that meet several criteria:
- High capacity
- Low cost
- Low power
- High bandwidth
Multicore SoC Architecture Optimization
Once again with Synopsys and Arteris, the innovation is coming to solve an issue, faced by their potential customers: “In our research, we’ve found that almost half of project delays are caused by problems with the system architecture design and specification,” said Chris Rommel, vice president, embedded… Read More
Apple’s iPAD 3 Kicks Off a Season For Silicon Valley Re-Alignments
The Corporate PC may finally be on life supports and with it the purveyors of the hardware and software solutions as consumer adoption of new technology outpaces the carefully planned IT budgets that guarantee positive 3 year Returns on Investments (ROI). The Apple of the consumer’s eye will soon feast on the iPAD 3 with its retina… Read More
Smartphone shipments in Q4’11, the Milky Way the new limit!
In a previous blog, I was forecasting smartphone shipment to reach 430 million units in 2011. I was wrong! Apparently, I am not better than other analysts, as the actual figures for the smartphone shipment in 2011 are more than slightly different, as these have topped 491.4 million units! After 304 million in 2010, that’s a 61.3 percent… Read More
Powering the Platforms: ARM’s 2012 Approach
A client turned me on to a great new book, “The Age of the Platform” by Phil Simon. It’s about how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have radically transformed the landscape. For me, it’s not just social networking – it’s social computing, changing how things are designed.
I’m borrowing this right from Phil’s… Read More
Synopsys latest acquisitions: ExpertIO (VIP) and Inventure (IP)… Any counter-attack from Cadence?
Even if ExpertIO acquisition by Synopsys, coming after nSys acquisition a couple of months ago, will not have a major impact on Synopsys’ balance sheet, it will again change the Verification IP market landscape. The acquisition of Inventure, a subsidiary of Zuken, will have a major impact on the Interface IP market, even if it’s… Read More
Achieving Seamless 1.6 Tbps Interoperability for High BW HPC AI/ML SoCs: A Technical Webinar with Samtec and Synopsys