I recently had the opportunity to attend a SemiWiki webinar entitled “Chip-to-Chip Communication for Enterprise and Cloud”. The webinar was presented by SiFive and explored chip-to-chip communication strategies for a variety of applications. In the first part of the webinar, Ketan Mehta, director of SoC IP product marketing… Read More
Semiconductor Intellectual Property
Security in I/O Interconnects
I got a chance to chat with Richard Solomon at Synopsys recently about a very real threat for all of us and what Synopsys is doing about it. No, the topic isn’t the Coronavirus, it’s one that has been around a lot longer and will continue to be a very real threat – data and interconnect security.
First, a bit about Richard. He is the technical… Read More
Hyper-Scaling Of Data Centers – Environmental Impact Of The Carbon ‘Cloud’
It is predicted that by 2030 energy consumption attributable to data centers will make up a staggering 8% of the world’s total usage!
As we move in to 2020 it’s clear that every sector of industry, including the semiconductor industry, will have a responsibility to address growing environmental concerns. We should be aware that… Read More
5G Infrastructure Opens Up
It seemed we were more or less resigned to Huawei owning 5G infrastructure worldwide. Then questions about security came to the fore, Huawei purchases were put on hold (though that position is being tested outside the US) and opportunity for other infrastructure suppliers (Ericsson, Nokia, etc) has opened up again.
Building … Read More
Why IP Designers Don’t Like Surprises!
If it’s your job to get a SoC design through synthesis, timing/power closure and final verification, the last thing you need are surprises in new versions of the IP blocks that are integrated into the design. If your IP supplier sends a new version, the best possible scenario is that this is only a small incremental change from… Read More
Turbo-Charge Your Next PCIe SoC with PLDA Switch IP
SemiWiki has a new IP partner, PLDA and they bring a lot to the party. Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) is a popular high-performance data interface standard. Think GPUs, RAID cards, WiFi cards or solid-state disk (SSD) drives connected to a motherboard. The protocol offers much higher throughput than previous… Read More
An Objective Hardware Security Metric in Sight
Security has been a domain blessed with an abundance of methods to improve in various ways, not so much in methods to measure the effectiveness of those improvements. With the best will in the world, absent an agreed security measurement, all those improvement techniques still add up to “trust me, our baby monitor camera is really… Read More
Trends in AI and Safety for Cars
The potential for AI in cars, whether for driver assistance or full autonomy, has been trumpeted everywhere and continues to grow. Within the car we have vision, radar and ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles in front, behind and to the side of the car. Outside the car, V2x promises to share real-time information between vehicles… Read More
Talking Sense With Moortec – The Future Of Embedded Monitoring Part 2
The rate of product development is facing very real challenges as the pace of silicon technology evolution begins to slow. Today, we are squeezing the most out of transistor physics, which is essentially derived from 60-year-old CMOS technology. To maintain the pace of Moore’s law, it is predicted that in 2030 we will need transistors… Read More
The First SiFive Tech Symposiums of 2020 are Fast Approaching – We’ll be in San José, Costa Rica, and Mexico City This Month
We’re confirming seats for our first two SiFive Tech Symposiums in 2020. The first will take place in San José, Costa Rica on February 25, and the second will be in Mexico City, Mexico, on February 28. Just like our 2019 symposiums, these events are designed to engage the global hardware community in the RISC-V ecosystem, and to further… Read More


Is Intel About to Take Flight?