A Veritable who’s who of ReRAM researchers will be present at the 2nd International Workshop on Resistive RAM at Stanford in the beginning of October. Sponsored by IMEC and Stanford’s NMRTI (Non-Volatile Technology Research Initiative), the program features two days of talks, panel sessions and no doubt lots of… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
ReRAM Based Memory Buffers in SSDs
In a paper at the VLSI meeting in Hawaii, Professor Ken Takeuchi described using an ReRAM buffer with an SSD. He points to some major performance gains that one can expect from such a configuration in terms of energy, speed and lifetime. Is this an opportunity for ReRAM that could spur development of the technology? Read more in a post… Read More
High Speed PHY Interfacing with SSIC, UFS or PCI express in Smartphone, Media tablet and Ultrabook at Lower Power
We have recently commented the announcement from MIPI Alliance and PCI-SIG, allowing PCI Express to be used in martphone, Media tablet and Ultrabook, while keeping decent power consumption, compatible with these mobile devices. The secret sauce is in the High Speed SerDes function selected to interface with these high data … Read More
ARM, Intel, Apple: It’s Mobile Week
As Dan wrote here, we got invited by Intel to IDF and by ARM to a cheeky little party that they organized the day before. I asked ARM if they were announcing anything and they said basically that it would be foolish to make any announcement the week of their biggest competitors big show. Well, that wasn’t a rule that Apple felt like… Read More
Cadence September News: strong IP and VIP focus
There are three articles on the front page, in the September release of Cadence newsletter, all of them are dedicated to either IP (DDR4), VIP (NVM express VIP being used at Samsung) or Martin Lund. You can read Martin’s interview here and/or take a look at what I write about him this summer. This strong focus on IP, and in fact on Interface… Read More
Intel Finally Comes Clean on 22nm SoCs!
Ever since Intel announced that they will leverage their advanced process technology leadership into the mobile SoC market I have expressed my doubts. I know how Intel designs their microprocessors, having worked for many of their vendors over the years and having friends at Intel who are actually doing the work. Disclaimer: … Read More
Is DDR4 a bridge too far?
We’ve gone through two decades where the PC market made the rules for technology. The industry faces a question now: Can a new technology go mainstream without the PC?
By now, you’ve certainly read the news from Cadence on their DDR4 IP for TSMC 28nm. They are claiming a PHY implementation that exceeds the data rates specified for … Read More
Fabless Semiconductor Ecosystem Update 2012
Just a reminder, the semiconductor industry is doing quite well thanks to the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. TSMC, my economic bellwether, reported another great month with a 32% increase over August 2011 and a 16% increase over January-August 2011. TSMC is forecasting Q3 at a 7% increase over Q2, which was an amazing 21% increase… Read More
Micron ReRAM Patent Alert
Micron recently was awarded patents related to ReRAM. As everyone knows, patents are the lifeblood of technology based industries and the memory business is no different. But what can you learn from a patent? In the first of a series of Blogs, Christie Marrian moderator of the ReRAM-Forum asks that question in the context of patents… Read More
A Brief History of Tensilica
In the late 1990s, a change was going on in chip design. Companies had moved to system-on-chip design, which incorporated a general-purpose control processor plus blocks of logic (often called RTL) to do the hard tasks that the general-purpose processor couldn’t handle.
These blocks of logic were becoming a huge problem because… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography