Looking backward and forward, the white paper from Codasip “Scaling is Failing” by Roddy Urquhart provides an interesting history of processor development since the early 1970s to the present. However it doesn’t stop there and continues to extrapolate what the chip industry has in store for the rest of this decade. For the last… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
High-speed, low-power, Hybrid ADC at IP-SoC
Andrew Levy and I both worked at Intel and Opmaxx, and I knew that he was now working at Alphacore, an IP company specializing in mixed-signal, RF, imaging and rad-hard applications. I was curious what Alphacore was up to, so at the IP-SoC Silicon Valley 2022 event I watched the ADC presentation from Ken Potts, COO of Alphacore. Mr.… Read More
Designing Ultra-Low-Power, Always On IP
It’s popular to use DSP chips for vision processing in diverse applications like ADAS, security cameras and AR. Tensilica has been designing DSP chips and IP since 1997, and their technology was successful enough that Cadence acquired Tensilica back in 2013. At the IP-SoC Silicon Valley 2022 event in April I had the pleasure… Read More
Advantages of Large-Scale Synchronous Clocking Domains in AI Chip Designs
We are currently in the hockey stick growth phase of AI. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are happening at a lightning pace. And, while the rate of adoption is exploding, so is model size. Over the past couple of years, we’ve gone from about two billion parameters to Google Brain’s recently announced trillion-parameter… Read More
Design IP Sales Grew 19.4% in 2021, confirm 2016-2021 CAGR of 9.8%
Design IP Sales reached $5.45B in 2021, or 19.4% YoY after 16% in 2020, on-sync with semiconductor growth of 26.2% in 2021 according to WSTS. IPnest has released the “Design IP Report” in May 2022, ranking IP vendors by category (CPU, DSP, GPU & ISP, Wired Interface, SRAM Memory Compiler, Flash Memory Compiler, Library and I/O,… Read More
Bigger, Faster and Better AI: Synopsys NPUs
AI-based applications are fast advancing with evolving neural network (NN) models, pushing aggressive performance envelopes. Just a few years ago, performance requirements of NN driven applications were at 1 TOPS and less. Current and future applications in the areas of augmented reality (AR), surveillance, high-end smartphones,… Read More
Experts Talk: RISC-V CEO Calista Redmond and Maven Silicon CEO Sivakumar P R on RISC-V Open Era of Computing
India’s top VLSI Training Services company Maven Silicon, a RISC-V Global Training Partner, conducted an insightful discussion with the industry experts Ms. Calista Redmond, CEO, RISC-V International and Mr. Sivakumar P R, CEO, Maven Silicon, on the topic “RISC-V Open Era of Computing”.
To introduce RISC-V, it is a free and … Read More
Assembly Automation. Repair or Replace?
It is difficult to imagine an SoC development team not using some form of automation to assemble their SoCs; the sheer complexity of the assembly task for modern designs is already far beyond hand-crafted top-level RTLs. An increasing number of groups have already opted for solutions based on the IP-XACT integration standard.… Read More
Truechip’s DisplayPort 2.0 Verification IP (VIP) Solution
Integrating IP to build SoCs has been consistently on the rise. Growth in complexity and meeting time to market pressures are some primary drivers behind this phenomenon. Consequentially, the IP market segment has also been enjoying tremendous growth. While this is great news for chip design schedules, it does highlight the … Read More
Spatial Audio: Overcoming Its Unique Challenges to Provide A Complete Solution
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is a philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and perception [Source: Wikipedia]. Setting aside the philosophical aspects, if one wasn’t present where a sound was generated, the sound was lost forever.… Read More


TSMC CoWoS versus Intel EMIB Semiconductor Packaging