A lot of the press we see on AI tends to be of the “big iron” variety – recognition algorithms for Facebook images, Google TensorFlow and IBM Watson systems. But AI is already on edge-nodes such as smartphones and home automation hubs, for functions like voice-recognition, facial recognition and natural language understanding.… Read More
New Cortex-M7 Chip to Help Power Sophisticated IoT Solutions
IoT architects face a dilemma in partitioning the compute power of their systems between the cloud and the edge. The cloud offers large storage and heavy duty compute power, making it an attractive place to perform the computation needed for IoT tasks. However, moving large amounts of data from the edge to the cloud servers, can … Read More
End-to-End Secure IoT Solutions from ARM
ARM announced today a comprehensive suite of solutions for IoT support, from IP optimized for applications in this space all the way to cloud-based support to manage edge devices in the field. Their motivation is to provide a faster path to secure IoT, from the chip to the cloud. One especially interesting component of this solution… Read More
Soitec – Enabling the FDSOI Revolution
Recently I published two blogs on Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FDSOI) and the potential the technology shows for a variety of low power and wireless applications. In order to produce FDSOI devices, the device layer has to be thin enough to ensure the device is fully depleted and ideally the buried oxide has to be thin enough… Read More
Of distant dreams and violent delights
Another report today of a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 catching fire, this time an allegedly refurbished unit, takes us back to the turning point in Samsung mobile phone history. It’s not the first time a defective Samsung phone – or a pile of thousands of them – has been on fire.
Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-Hee issued a powerful edict to his mobile… Read More
Free Copy of Mobile Unleashed: The History of ARM!
As most of you know SemiWiki published a book which is a really nice history of ARM. We have received many compliments on it and we are very proud. As a thank you to all SemiWiki members I would like to offer a free electronic version of the book (PDF). You can access it via the attachment at the bottom of this wiki:
Power Exploration at RTL Design with Mentor PowerPro
There was a comment recently that design for low power is not an event, it’s a process; that comment is absolutely correct. Power is affected by everything in the electronic ecosystem, from application software all the way down to layout and process choices. Yet power as a metric is much more challenging to model and control than … Read More
It’s a heterogeneous world and cache rules it now
Cache evolved when the world was all about homogeneous processing and slow and expensive shared memory. Now, compute is just part of the problem – devices need to handle display, connectivity, storage, and other tasks, all at the same time. Different, heterogeneous cores handle different workflows in the modern SoC, and the burden… Read More
Mentor Webinar on Power Exploration for Optimizing Power
There are a lot of clever techniques to automatically find and even implement methods for register gating and memory gating, but the bulk of power-saving still depends on designer and architect insight based on expected range of use of a device, complemented by practical use-case simulations. Of course this team needs to be able… Read More
The CIA, NSA, and Pokemon Go?
So it’s finally out, the truth about Pokemon Go (and probably the rest of the app based mobile gaming world) and it’s a shocking, painful truth that will pretty much destroy the industry and force people back to their sedentary, solitary lives in front of their computers. And just as the average weight of an American … Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay