I have written recently about SmarCoT (Smart Connected Thing) and smartwatches are one of these numerous smart and connected applications that some still refer to as IoT. Imagination Technologies is working hard to be part of the SmarCoT ecosystem and Ingenic, IMG customer, has recently launched a MIPS-based chip (M200) and … Read More
Atmel, IoT and CryptoAuthentication
One of the companies that is best positioned to supply components into the IoT market is Atmel. For the time being most designs will be done using standard components, not doing massive integration on an SoC targeted at a specific market. The biggest issue in the early stage of market development will be working out what the customer… Read More
Arteris on a winning streak in 2014
When Arteris sold key network-on-chip intellectual property and most of its human assets to Qualcomm earlier this year, it was big news. We suggested the bigger news after a restaffing effort would be a next-generation NoC release, and a new round of design wins.
Some developments were already in the pipeline. … Read More
Simulation and Analysis of Power and Thermal Management Policies
Earlier this month I blogged about Power Management Policies for Android Devices, so this blog is part two in the series and delves into the details of using ESL-level tools for simulation and analysis. The motivation behind all of this is to optimize a power management system during the early design phase, instead of waiting until… Read More
Intel Quits Mobile
It happened today. As I have predicted for over a year, Intel would not be successful in mobile and would be forced to exit the market. Last quarter they lost $1B on revenues of $1M (as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up, that M is not a typo). They ship “contra revenue” with their chips for the tablet market, meaning… Read More
Make Semiconductor IP Reuse Successful?
As I have mentioned before, Apple has changed the way we live on many different levels (iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, etc…) and the Apple Ax SoC series is no different. You have to ask yourself how is Apple able to churn out a new industry leading SoC EVERY year? I can assure you design reuse is a big part of that answer.
One of the companies… Read More
Invionics: a New EDA Company is Born
Something happened this morning that doesn’t happen too much any more: a new EDA company came out of stealth mode and announced its product line. The company is Invionics, and they are based in Vancouver BC. The CEO is Brad Quinton who largely funded the company himself, although with some grants from the Canadian government.… Read More
IEDM 2014 Preview
The International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is one of the premier conferences for the presentation of the latest semiconductor processes and process technologies. IEDM is held every year in December alternating between San Francisco and Washington DC. This year IEDM will be held at the San Francisco Hilton on December… Read More
Analyzing Cortex-A53 octa-core on Linux
Octa-core sells smartphones and tablets. 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 implementations are available from Huawei, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Samsung, and now Marvell, with Rockchip and others on the way. Suddenly, almost everyone planning to run Linux is being asked for octa-core designs.
If it were easy, anyone could do it. Increasing … Read More
Xilinx Announces SDAccel, Accelerators for the Datacenter
Today Xilinx announced SDAccel, an initiative for the data-center. This is the second of a series of software defined development initiatives for various markets, the first being SDNet that is targeted at building networking applications. One challenge that a company like Xilinx faces is that as the scale of design move up to … Read More
Application-Specific Lithography: Sense Amplifier and Sub-Wordline Driver Metal Patterning in DRAM