While the ASIC market has always had its advantages over alternate solutions, it has faced boom and bust cycles typically driven by high NRE development costs and time to market lead times. During the same time, the FPGA market has been consistently bringing out more and more advanced products with each new generation. With very… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
DSP IP for High Performance Sensor Fusion on an Embedded Budget
Whether we realize it or not, everyday applications we use depend on data gathered by sensors. We can bet that pretty much every application uses at least a couple of different types of sensors, if not more. That is because different types of sensors are better suited to collect data depending on the application, the environment … Read More
Chiplets at the Design Automation Conference with OpenFive
SemiWiki has been tracking the popularity of chiplets for two years now so it was not surprising to see that they played a key role at DAC. The other trend we foresaw was that the ASIC companies would be early chiplet adopters and that has proven true. One of the more vocal proponents of chiplets at DAC#59 was OpenFive, a 17+ year spec-to-silicon… Read More
Scalability – A Looming Problem in Safety Analysis
Scalability – A Looming Problem in Safety Analysis
The boundless possibilities of automation in cars and other vehicles have captivated designers to the point that electronic content is now a stronger driver of differentiation than any other factor. It accounts for a substantial fraction of material cost in any of these vehicles.… Read More
Arm Aims at Mobile Gaming
Clearly unfazed by the collapse of the proposed merger with Nvidia, Arm just announced products in support of, what else, mobile gaming. Nvidia turf. Of course Nvidia’s gaming strength is in tethered platforms or laptops. However, understand that 50% of video gaming revenue in 2020 came from smartphone games and that growth is… Read More
Memory Security Relies on Ultra High-Performance AES-XTS Encryption/Decryption
A recent SemiWiki post covered the topic of protecting high-speed interfaces in data centers using security IP. That post was based on a presentation made by Dana Neustadter at IP-Soc Silicon Valley 2022 conference. Dana’s talk was an overview of various interfaces and Synopsys’ security IP for protecting those interfaces. … Read More
Interface IP in 2021: $1.3B, 22% growth and $3B in 2026
If you want to remember the key points for Interface IP in 2021, just consider $1.3B, 22%, $3B. Interface IP category has generated $1 billion 300 million in 2021, or 22.7% year to year growth, thanks to high runner protocols PCIe, DDR memory controller and Ethernet/SerDes. Even more impressive is the forecast, as IPnest predict… Read More
CEO Interview: Barry Paterson of Agile Analog
Barry Paterson is the CEO of UK-based analog IP pioneer, Agile Analog. He has held senior leadership, engineering and product management roles at Dialog Semiconductor and Wolfson Microelectronics. He has been involved in the development of custom, mixed-signal silicon solutions for many of the leading mobile and consumer … Read More
5G for IoT Gets Closer
Very recently, 3GPP announced that 5G Release 17 was finalized. One important consequence is that 5G RedCap (reduced capacity) is now real and that means 5G becomes accessible to IoT devices. Think smart wearables (e.g. watches), industrial sensors and surveillance devices. “So what?”, you protest. “I don’t need 5G on my watch.… Read More
Verifying Inter-Chiplet Communication
Chiplets are hot now as a way to extend Moore’s Law, dividing functionality across multiple die within a single package. It’s no longer practical to jam all functionality onto a single die in the very latest processes, exceeding reticle limits in some cases and in others straining cost/yield. This is not an academic concern. Already… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet