Joe has devoted his career to understanding and designing cache coherent systems and has been granted over 95 patents on the subject. For the past four years, he has been Chief Architect at NetSpeed, a developer of network-on-chip SoC interconnect.… Read More
NetSpeed Bridges the Gap Between Architecture and Implementation
This is part II of an article covering NetSpeed’s network-on-chip (NoC) offerings. This article dives a little deeper into what a NoC is and how NetSpeed’s network synthesis tool, NocStudio, helps system architects optimize a NoC for their system-on-a-chip (SoC) design.
Traditionally IC designers have used proprietary buses,… Read More
NetSpeed Leverages Machine Learning for Automotive IC End-to-End QoS Solutions
A couple of weeks back I wrote an article about the use of machine learning and deep neural networks in self-driving cars. Now I find that machine learning is also being applied to help build advanced end-to-end QoS (quality of service) solutions for the automotive IC market. With the advent of self-driving cars comes requirements… Read More
ISO 9001:2015 – Not Just for the Big Guys
If you are like me, you remember the banners that large companies put up years ago when they achieved ISO 9001 compliance. It seemed at the time that this was something only for large companies. Since its introduction in 1987 ISO 9001 has both evolved as a standard and has become an achievement that not just large manufacturing companies… Read More
CEO Interview: Rene Donkers of Fractal Technologies
Fractal is another one of those very successful emerging EDA companies that you don’t read a lot about, except on SemiWiki. Rene Donkers is co-founder and CEO of Fractal Technologies, a company addressing IP quality assurance. This is a niche in the SoC tooling market that deserves some justification. Why not use an IP as-is… Read More
CEO Interview: Albert Li of Platform DA
Platform Design Automation, Inc (PDA). recently closed a US$6 million pre Series A investment round, and the company has shifted its focus from providing SPICE modeling related software and services to forming a complete AI-driven ecosystem from probing to simulation. Albert Li was the GM of Accelicon, a leading EDA tool and … Read More
Improving on EMACS for VHDL Creation
OK – I admit I titled this piece as clickbait. There is a core of designers for whom belief in the supremacy of EMACS for RTL creation comes close to religion. Some will read only the title and jump immediately to penning searing comments questioning my intelligence, experience, parenthood and ability to tie my own shoes. Some, I hope,… Read More
Quality in Hard IP
I was CTO at Atrenta, home of SpyGlass, for many years before the company was acquired by Synopsys, so I know a thing or two about IP quality, to paraphrase a popular commercial. The problem is that even in the best-run IP shops, errors happen. Sometimes they happen on simple changes, especially when you think “This IP has been very … Read More
Always-On IoT – FDSOI’s Always Better? What About Wafers? (Questions from Shanghai)
Mahesh Tirupattur, EVP at low-power SERDES pioneer Analog Bits lead off the panel discussion at the recent FD-SOI Forum in Shanghai with the assertion that for anything “always on” in IoT, FD-SOI’s always better. They had a great experience porting their SERDES IP to 28nm FD-SOI (which they detailed last spring – see the ppt here… 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