When it comes to security we’re all outraged at the manifest incompetence of whoever was most recently hacked, leaking personal account details for tens of millions of clients and everyone firmly believes that “they” ought to do better. Yet as a society there’s little evidence beyond our clickbait Pavlovian responses that we’re… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Tensilica HiFi DSPs for What I Want to Hear, and What I Don’t Want to Hear
It seems every day we see a new article (or ten) on autonomous driving. It is an especially hot topic, and it will happen someday. For now, we can dream about it, and many people are working on it. But for the present, the technology in a car that commands my attention is audio. I’ve been a musician since 4th grade. I still perform occasionally… Read More
WEBINAR: The Brave New World of Customized Memory
The need to design low power devices is not new. However, the criticality of lowering the power consumption of chip designs has never been as important as it is now. In 1989, I purchased one of the first consumer cell phones produced by Panasonic. The battery was the size of a brick, but only about a third of the thickness. If the battery… Read More
Tortuga Webinar: Ensuring System Level Security Through HW/SW Verification
We all know (I hope) that security is important so we’re willing to invest time and money in this area but there are a couple of problems. First there’s no point in making your design secure if it’s not competitive and making it competitive is hard enough, so the great majority of resource and investment is going to go into that objective.… Read More
eFPGA – What a great idea! But I have no idea how I’d use it!
eFPGA stands for embedded Field Programmable Grid Arrays. An eFPGA is a programmable device like an FPGA but rather than being sold as a completed chip it is licensed as a semiconductor IP block. ASIC designers can license this IP and embed it into their own chips adding the flexibility of programmability at an incremental cost.… Read More
Arm Gets More Creative with Licensing
Without a doubt, RISC-V is generating a lot of buzz and I’m sure a lot of new designs, especially in spaces that are super-cost competitive or demand added differentiation in the processor. I doubt this is having meaningful impact on Arm business, in $$ rather than press. It takes a long time to replace an ecosystem of that size and … Read More
SiFive Fosters RISC-V Collaboration and Education in India and Bangladesh Via Symposiums, Tutorials and Workshops
Last year we hosted several SiFive Tech Symposiums in India to help promulgate the RISC-V ecosystem in the region. The enthusiastic reception from those in industry as well as students and faculty at India’s most esteemed universities was inspiring. This July and August, we’re bringing the SiFive Tech Symposium back to India,… Read More
Synopsys and Synaptics Talk About Securing the Connected Home
Like many people, I have been adding automation to my home, and the number of connected devices I use has slowly but steadily increased. These include light bulbs, cameras, switches, a thermostat, a voice assistant, etc. Between them, they know when I am home or away, and have the ability to record images and sound. In addition to … Read More
Location Indoors: Bluetooth 5.1 Advances Accuracy
OK, so you’re in a giant mall, you want to find a store that sells gloves and you want to know how to get there. Or you’re in a supermarket and you need some obscure item, say capers, that doesn’t really fall under any of the main headings they post over the aisles. If you’re like most of us, certainly like me, this can be a frustrating experience.… Read More
Safety Methods Meet Enterprise SSDs
The use of safety-centric logic design techniques for automotive applications is now widely appreciated, but did you know that similar methods are gaining traction in the design of enterprise-level SSD controllers? In the never-ending optimization of datacenters, a lot attention is being paid to smart storage, offloading… Read More


AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification