One of the sessions at the Linley Fall Processor Conference 2021 was the SoC Design session. With a horizontal focus, it included presentations of interest to a variety of different market applications. The talk by Mo Faisal, CEO of Movellus, caught my attention as it promises to solve a chronic issue relating to synchronizing … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Effectively Managing Large IP Portfolios For Complex SoC Projects
In today’s world, no IC design is completed without instantiating a few or many pre-verified or already proven intellectual property (IP) blocks. With break-neck pace at which chip designs are advancing, many IP blocks may even be entire chip designs from earlier product releases. Third-party IP market has been growing at a healthy… Read More
RedCap Will Accelerate 5G for IoT
You could be forgiven for wondering why I should push 5G when it might seem marketing is still ahead of deployment. While we may not all have it today, GlobeNewswire (September 22, 2021 12:30 ET) estimates there will be 700 million 5G connections across the world by the end of this year. That’s pretty rapid growth already, though still… Read More
Enlisting Entropy to Generate Secure SoC Root Keys
Most methods of securing SOCs involve storing a root key that provides the basis of all derived keys and encryption of communication. The weakness with these methods is that even if the root key is stored in secure non-volatile memory, there are often methods to read the key. Once a key has been divulged the device can be cloned and … Read More
A Next-Generation Prototyping System for ASIC and Pre-Silicon Software Development
Every now and then, disruptive technology is brought to market, challenging the way things have been done to that point. We are all familiar with many such technologies. The rhetorical question is, how many of us were aware, recognized and acknowledged those technologies before they became well established? For example, a startup… Read More
CEO Interview: Da Chuang of Expedera
Da is co-founder and CEO of Expedera. Previously, he was cofounder and COO of Memoir Systems, an optimized memory IP startup, leading to a successful acquisition by Cisco. At Cisco, he led the Datacenter Switch ASICs for Nexus 3/9K, MDS, CSPG products. Da brings more than 25 years of ASIC experience at Cisco, Nvidia, and Abrizio.… Read More
Low Power High Performance PCIe SerDes IP for Samsung Silicon
No matter how impressive the specifications are for an SoC, the power performance and area of the finished design all depend on the IP selected for the IO blocks. In particular, most SOCs designed for consumer and enterprise applications rely heavily on PCI Express. Because PCIe analog IP is critical to design success, Samsung … Read More
CEO Interview: Mo Faisal of Movellus
Prior to founding Movellus, Dr. Faisal held positions at semiconductor companies such as Intel and PMC Sierra. Faisal received his B.S. from the University of Waterloo, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and holds several patents. Dr. Faisal was named a “Top 20 Entrepreneur” by the University of Michigan Zell… Read More
High-Performance Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Constrained Embedded Systems
Current technology news is filled with talk of many edge applications moving processing from the cloud to the edge. One of the presentations at the recently concluded Linley Group Fall Processor Conference was about AI moving from the cloud to the edge. Rightly so, there were several sessions dedicated to discussing AI and edge… Read More
Traceability and ISO 26262
Since traceability and its relationship to ISO 26262 may be an unfamiliar topic for many of my readers, I thought it might be useful to spend some time on why this area is important. What is the motivation behind a need for traceability in support of automotive systems development? The classic verification and validation V-diagram… Read More


TSMC CoWoS versus Intel EMIB Semiconductor Packaging