The outlook for the semiconductor market for the remainder of 2015 is mixed. Intel’s 3Q 2015 revenues were up 10% from 2Q 2015 and guidance is for 2.3% growth in 4Q 2015. Most other companies which have announced 3Q 2015 results expect revenue declines in 4Q 2015. The most severe drops (based on the midpoint of company guidance) are… Read More
Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me?
Macbeth may have been uncertain of what he saw but, until recently, image recognition systems would have fared even less well. The energy and innovation put into increasingly complex algorithms always seemed to fall short of what any animal (including us humans) is able to do without effort. Machine vision algorithms have especially… Read More
Diversity of chip segments had tempered downturns but no more?
* The Current Downturn is more Broadly Based…
* Back to the “bad old days” of Lemmings off a cliff???
* Its not just a Foundry thing…
* All corners of the chip industry are impacted!!!… Read More
New CoreLink IP ties in mobile GPU coherently
A mobile GPU is an expensive piece of SoC real estate in terms of footprint and power consumption, but critical to meeting user experience demands. GPU IP tuned for OpenGL ES is now a staple in high performance mobile devices, rendering polygons with shading and texture compression at impressive speeds.
Creative minds in the desktop… Read More
My View of Contextual Leadership
Go off and do something wonderful,” said Robert (Bob) Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild semiconductors and Intel Corporation. He was heard, and the quality of our lives has been elevated by the wonderful pursuits of skilled pioneers. Notice that Bob did not say, “Go off and become great leaders.” This is because great leaders of the… Read More
Delivering Zero Defect Products – EVS Testing
Competition in the semiconductor product marketplace has grown increasingly difficult as suppliers constantly search for ways to differentiate their products. Customers expect low cost, problem-free product performance. Automotive manufacturers in particular expect zero defects as field failures can prove very costly.… Read More
Shifting Low Power Verification to an IP to SoC Flow
One of the most exciting recent developments in low power design and verification is the successive refinement flow developed by ARM® and Mentor Graphics®.… Read More
Do 8 Cores Really Matter in Smartphones?
As the smartphone industry has begun to mature, one-upmanship among smartphone manufacturers and SoC vendors has bred a dangerous trend: ever-increasing processor core counts and the association between increased CPU core count and greater performance. This association originated as SoC vendors and OEMs have tried to find… Read More
To err is runtime; to manage, NoC
Software abstraction is a huge benefit of a network-on-chip (NoC), but with flexibility comes the potential for runtime errors. Improper addresses and illegal commands can generate unexpected behavior. Timeouts can occur on congested paths. Security violations can arise from oblivious or malicious access attempts.
Runtime… Read More
Are FinFETs too Expensive for Mainstream Chips?
One of the most common things I hear now is that the majority of the fabless semiconductor business will stay at 28nm due to the high cost of FinFETs. I wholeheartedly disagree, mainly because I have been hearing that for many years and it has yet to be proven true. The same was said about 40nm since 28nm HKMG was more expensive, which … Read More
TSMC 16th OIP Ecosystem Forum First Thoughts