We have learned from nature that two characteristics are helpful for success, diversity and adaptability. The same has been shown to be true for computing systems. Things have come a long way from when CPU centric computing was the only choice. Much heavy lifting these days is done by GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs, with CPUs in a support … Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Arm Inches Closer to Supercomputing
When it comes to Arm, we think mostly of phones and the “things” in the IoT. We know they’re in a lot of other places too, such as communications infrastructure but that’s a kind of diffuse image – “yeah, they’re everywhere”. We like easy-to-understand targets: phones, IoT devices, we get those. More recently Arm started to talk about… Read More
Intel vs AMD vs Google vs Amazon vs NUVIA
Arguably the cloud was the quickest road to riches for chip designers large and small. As an emerging company, if you wanted to raise money just put “Datacenter” in your pitch deck and you were assured millions. You would be competing with semiconductor’s version of David and Goliath (AMD and Intel) but that was a good thing, right?… Read More
MIPI gaining traction in vehicle ADAS and ADS
I am old enough to remember when cars did not come with air conditioning unless you purchased it as an option. Of course, now you can’t even find a car that doesn’t come with air conditioning. So, it goes with Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). They are becoming more and more common and will certainly become baseline features… Read More
SiFive is Teaming with Many of the Most Prestigious Universities in South America to Engage Academia in the RISC-V Ecosystem!
We’re confirming seats in São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Bucaramanga for the South American leg of our worldwide 2019 SiFive Tech Symposiums and Workshops. These five events will be focused heavily on academia, which is a key focus for SiFive. In fact, we are co-hosting these events with many of the most prestigious… Read More
Evolving Landscape of Self-Driving Safety Standards
I sat in a couple of panels at Arm TechCon this year, the first on how safety is evolving for platform-based architectures with a mix of safety-aware IP and the second on lessons learned in safety and particularly how the industry and standards are adapting to the larger challenges in self-driving, which obviously extend beyond … Read More
A No-Fudge ML Architecture for Arm
At TechCon I had a 1×1 with Steve Roddy, VP of product marketing in the Machine Learning (ML) Group at Arm. I wanted to learn more about their ML direction since I previously felt that, amid a sea of special ML architectures from everyone else, they were somewhat fudging their position in this space. What I heard earlier was that… Read More
ReRAM Revisited
I met with Sylvain Dubois (VP BizDev and Marketing of Crossbar) at TechCon to get an update on his views on ReRAM technology. I’m really not a semiconductor process guy so I’m sure I’m slower than the experts to revelations in this area. But I do care about applications so I hope I can add an app spin on the topic, also Sylvain’s views on… Read More
Cadence Dives Deeper at Linley Fall Processor Conference
I wrote about Cadence AI IP not long ago when I covered the Cadence Automotive Summit at the end of July (Tensilica DNA 100 Brings the AI Inference Solution for Level 2 ADAS ECUs and Level 4 Autonomous Driving, Tensilica HiFi DSPs for What I Want to Hear, and What I Don’t Want to Hear). One of those two blogs remains one of my most widely … Read More
Efficiency – Flex Logix’s Update on InferX™ X1 Edge Inference Co-Processor
Last week I attended the Linley Fall Processor Conference held in Santa Clara, CA. This blog is the first of three blogs I will be writing based on things I saw and heard at the event.
In April, Flex Logix announced its InferX X1 edge inference co-processor. At that time, Flex Logix announced that the IP would be available and that a chip,… Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification