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Nvidia’s Pegasus Putsch!

Nvidia’s Pegasus Putsch!
by Roger C. Lanctot on 10-29-2017 at 7:00 am

There hasn’t been this much excitement in Munich since the 1920’s. Nvidia’s great pivot was on display at the GPU Technology Conference Munich 2017. Digital dashboards are out and robotaxis are in as Nvidia narrows its focus on the tip of the automotive industry disruption spear.

To be clear, Nvidia is triangulating on the automotive… Read More


Software Defined Networks (on Chip) – NetSpeed Systems and UltraSoC Team Up to Use Embedded Analytics to Enable Next Generation SoCs

Software Defined Networks (on Chip) – NetSpeed Systems and UltraSoC Team Up to Use Embedded Analytics to Enable Next Generation SoCs
by Mitch Heins on 10-28-2017 at 7:00 am

NetSpeed Systems is known for their network-on-chip (NoC) IP that enables complex heterogeneous SoC architectures. NetSpeed IP supports both non-coherent and coherent memory and I/O schemes as well as configurable, customized last level cache optimization through their Orion, Gemini and Pegasus IP respectively. They are… Read More


Arm 2017 TechCon Keynote Simon Segar!

Arm 2017 TechCon Keynote Simon Segar!
by Daniel Nenni on 10-27-2017 at 7:00 am

Now that the dust has settled with the Softbank acquisition I must say that Arm is truly a different company. There are now a lot of new faces from outside the semiconductor industry, which is a good thing, and a lot less stress from Wall Street which is an even better thing. Simon can now wear whatever he wants without the worry of lowering… Read More


Navigating the System-in-a-Package Manufacturing Ecosystem

Navigating the System-in-a-Package Manufacturing Ecosystem
by Mitch Heins on 10-26-2017 at 12:00 pm

Being an old ASIC physical design guy, I tend to think of ASICs from a “bond-pads-in” perspective. This week however, I had a very eye-opening discussion with Dan Leung, Director of Packaging and Assembly for Open-Silicon, that totally changed my perspective. While I had been exposed many times to the concept of systems-in-a-package… Read More


Good Library Hygiene Takes More Than an Occasional Scrub

Good Library Hygiene Takes More Than an Occasional Scrub
by Bernard Murphy on 10-26-2017 at 7:00 am

You don’t shower only before you have to go to an important meeting (teenagers excepted). Surgical teams go further, demanding a strict regimen of hygiene be followed before anyone is allowed into an operating room. Yet we tend to assume that libraries and physical IP (analog, memories, other physical blocks) are checked and pronounced… Read More


Open source RISC-V ISA brings a new wrinkle to the processor market

Open source RISC-V ISA brings a new wrinkle to the processor market
by Tom Simon on 10-25-2017 at 12:00 pm

By now most people are quite comfortable with the idea of using an open source operating system for many computing tasks. It speaks volumes that Unix, and Linux in particular, is used in the vast majority of engineering, financial, data base, machine learning, data center, telecommunications and many other applications. It was… Read More


Timing Analysis for Embedded FPGA’s

Timing Analysis for Embedded FPGA’s
by Tom Dillinger on 10-25-2017 at 7:00 am

The initial project planning for an SoC design project faces a difficult engineering decision with regards to the “margin” that should be included as part of timing closure. For cell-based blocks, the delay calculation algorithms within the static timing analysis (STA) flow utilize various assumptions to replaceRead More


Silicon Creations talks about 7nm IP Verification for AMS Circuits

Silicon Creations talks about 7nm IP Verification for AMS Circuits
by Daniel Payne on 10-24-2017 at 12:00 pm

Designing at 7nm is a big deal because of the costs to make masks and then produce silicon that yields at an acceptable level, and Silicon Creations is one company that has the experience in designing AMS IP like: PLL, Serializer-Deserializer, IOs, Oscillators. Why design at 7nm? Lots of reasons – lower power, higher speeds,… Read More


DSP-Based Neural Nets

DSP-Based Neural Nets
by Bernard Murphy on 10-24-2017 at 7:00 am

You may be under the impression that anything to do with neural nets necessarily runs on a GPU. After all, NVIDIA dominates a lot of what we hear in this area, and rightly so. In neural net training, their solutions are well established. However, GPUs tend to consume a lot of power and are not necessarily optimal in inference performance… Read More


IoT Security Hardware Accelerators Go to the Edge

IoT Security Hardware Accelerators Go to the Edge
by Mitch Heins on 10-23-2017 at 12:00 pm


Last month I did an article about Intrinsix and their Ultra-Low Power Security IP for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). As a follow up to that article, I was told by one of my colleagues that the article didn’t make sense to him. The sticking point for him, and perhaps others (and that’s why I’m writing this article) is that he couldn’t … Read More