Royalty is a critical component in any IP deal. SoC companies want IP companies to share the risk of success (or failure) of their SoC and to enable that they want IP vendors to accept a substantial part of their payment to be paid as royalty. But the customers are also not very interested to shell out huge money to IP companies if the SoC… Read More
Silicon Catalyst partners with Arm to launch the Arm Flexible Access for Startups Contest!Winner and Runner-up to receive the contest’s largest…Read More
Synopsys Design IP for Modern SoCs and Multi-Die SystemsSemiconductor intellectual property (IP) plays a critical role…Read More
Enhancing the RISC-V Ecosystem with S2C Prototyping SolutionRISC-V's popularity stems from its open-source framework, enabling…Read More
Arteris Frames Network-On-Chip Topologies in the CarOn the heels of Arm’s 2024 automotive update,…Read More
Altera vs Xilinx FinFET Update
One of the things I do in my spare time is listen to quarterly conference calls and try to sort fact from fiction. I compare past calls to the current one and attempt to predict what’s coming next. Confucius said, “Study the past if you would define the future” and I’m a big believer in that.
Paul McLellan wrote about the Xilinx call earlier… Read More
Getting a Tapeout Quote in 10 Minutes!
On Thursday, July 31[SUP]st[/SUP] at 8 AM Pacific Daylight Time I’ll be moderating a webinar that will demo eSilicon’s new GDSII quoting portal. You can find more details about the webinar here, and you can register here.
I’ve worked with a lot of companies that do advanced custom IC designs. Getting a quote that covers all the NRE… Read More
Taking a leap forward from TCAD
We all know that Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) simulations are essential in developing processes for semiconductor manufacturing. From the very nature of these simulations (involving physical structure and corresponding electrical characteristics of a transistor or device), they are predominantly finite-element… Read More
Temperature – The Fourth Aspect to Look at in SoC Design
In my career in semiconductor industry, I can recall, in the beginning there was emphasis on design completion with automation as fast as possible. The primary considerations were area and speed of completion of a semiconductor design. Today, with unprecedented increase in multiple functions on the same chip and density of the… Read More
Hybrid Emulation
Hybrid emulation is when part of the system is run in the emulator and part of the system is run in a virtual prototype. Typically a model of the processor(s) is run in the virtual platform and then the rest of the design is modeled by running the RTL on the emulator. I talked to Tom Borgstrom at Synopsys about what technology they have … Read More
CEVA creating a wearable IP platform
Processor and GPU cores usually get the limelight, driven by the ARM and Imagination machines occupying the center square of most SoC designs. CEVA has quietly been assembling DSP IP in most of the squares around the edge, and may have just reached critical mass for wearables and IoT devices.… Read More
Clever IoT Devices are Coming!
Paul McLellan and I spent the evening with Samsung at the Bentley Reserve in San Francisco last night. One thing I discussed with them in great detail was IoT devices. Samsung is investing heavily in IoT and the supporting infrastructure. In fact, there is a rumor that Samsung is acquiring home automation company SmartThings for… Read More
Power Modeling and Simulation of System Memory Subsystem
One great benefit of designing at the ESL level is the promise of power savings on the order of 40% to 70% compared to using an RTL approach. Since a typical SoC can contain a hierarchy of memory, this kind of power savings could be a critical factor in meeting PPA goals. To find out how an SoC designer could use such an ESL approach to power… Read More
Atmel Licenses Mali and Security from ARM
Atmel (and ARM) announced yesterday that Atmel has licensed a portfolio of ARM IP for devices that require video, image and display capabilities. This portfolio includes Cortex-A7 (a 32-bit core), Mali-V500 (a video accelerator), Mali-DP500 (a display processor) and TrustZone technology (security technology). These can… Read More
The Data Crisis is Unfolding – Are We Ready?