Bringing the Semiconductor IP Community Together!

Next week is the first REUSE Semiconductor IP Tradeshow and Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. The presentation abstracts are up now and there are a few I want to highlight as they are companies that we work with on SemiWiki.

Flex Logix has two talks that should be of interest to chip architects and designers who are looking for embedded FPGA capabilities. Customers currently use Flex Logix in SoC, MCU, and IoT chips to be able to reconfigure critical RTL at any time during the design cycle which can save millions of dollars and prevent schedule delays. It can also extend the life of your chip and system by allowing future updates.

The first Flex Logix talk is at 10:45am in the Hahn Auditorium:

Embedded FPGAs for Architects & Physical Designers”by Tony Kozaczuk & Abhijit Abhyankar

Embedded FPGAs can provide flexibility, add value, and increase the ROI of your chip designs from IoT/MCU to Networking.

With Embedded FPGAs you can customize one chip to meet many applications/customer needs and/or evolve the chip to keep up, in-system, with changing protocols and standards.

Tony Kozaczuk, Director of Solutions Architecture, will summarize multiple use cases:
1. easy I/O pin multiplexing: reduce risk and increase the ability to observe more signals, programmably changeable in minutes
2. programmable serial I/O
3. programmable accelerators
4. extending battery life using embedded FPGA to offload tasks from the processor
5. programmable networking chips for Data Centers
6. fast, reconfigurable control logic up to ~1GHz in TSMC16FF+/FFC

Abhijit Abhyankar, VP Silicon Engineering, will discuss how physical designers can integrate an embedded FPGA
– what are the specific deliverables
– how to do resource and floor planning
– how to use LEF
– integrating GDS of the embedded FPGA
– metal stack up
– clock
– power grid connectivity
– how we prove out our hard IP in our validation chip architecture

The second Flex Logix talk is at 2pm in Lovelace:

“Embedded FPGA can extend your battery life”by Tony Kozaczuk,

Tony Kozaczuk, Director of Solutions Architecture, will detail an example of how a small amount of embedded FPGA in TSMC40ULP can extend battery life 2-5x compared to an ARM processor.

An ARM processor needs to do many memory accesses to execute code and process data which drives up energy use.

EFLX embedded FPGA can do several basic DSP tasks at lower energy and in less time.

The embedded FPGA can be used as an “always on” processor to offload the ARM core, only waking it up when needed for less repetitive tasks.

Tony will show the RTL code (available separately after the presentation) and detail the calculations involved in the analysis.

And don’t forget I will be giving away signed copies of “Mobile Unleashed” at the cocktail reception at 5pm. Register for REUSE 2016 for free HERE. You can read more about Flex Logix on SemiWiki HERE.

I hope to see you there! By the way, “Mobile Unleashed” currently has a five star rating on Amazon!

Also read: REUSE 2016 is Next Week at the Computer History Museum!