What platform has become the most sophisticated and intimate personal electronic environment ever? The car. To paraphrase a famous automotive company’s top executive, car companies are transforming the car into a powerful smartphone that allows drivers to carry around, customize, and interact with their digital world. Automotive… Read More
Modeling and Analysis of Single Event Effects (SEE)
Single Event Effects (SEE) are important because we depend upon our consumer, industrial and aerospace products to work reliably. Protons, electrons, neutrons, or alpha particles may perturb the MOS or bipolar device operation in either a destructive or non-destructive fashion. Galactic cosmic rays are one source of these… Read More
IMEC Technology Symposium
Yesterday I attended the IMEC Technology Forum at Semicon West. As always with IMEC, they present so much information it is like drinking from a firehose. I’ll say more about the future of process technology in a blog later this week, but this blog is about IMEC itself. It is an amazing success story. Let’s face it, if you were going … Read More
From ARM7 to such a Large CPU cores Port-Folio
I have heard about ARM processor for the very first time in 1990, when I was interviewed by ES2 Design Center manager before being hired to subcontract an ASIC design for ES2. I don’t know why, but I remember very well that he told me about two of the ES2 partners: ARM as a processor IP core provider and TSMC as a Foundry partner if, by chance,… Read More
Intel Custom Foundry Explained!
The exciting news is that Intel landed their first big SoC customer with Panasonic’s System LSI Business Division. These 14nm SoCs will be targeted to audio visual equipment markets. The significance here to me is that Intel not only has a big SoC customer, Intel now has a non-Silicon Valley based foundry customer. It is critical… Read More
S-engine Moves up the Integration of IPs into SoCs
As the semiconductor design community is seeing higher and higher levels of abstraction with standard IPs and other complex, customized IPs and sub-systems integrated together at the system level, sooner than later we will find SoCs to be just assemblies of numerous IPs selected off-the-self according to the design needs and… Read More
Is Now the Time to Buy Bitcoin?
I have to admit I, thus far, have been the ultimate Bitcoin cynic. Watching the price go from $2 in the fall of 2011 to $1132 in December 2013 was dizzying. It seemed reminiscent of Dutch tulip mania. A bitcoin that is not backed by anything physical such as gold, or by a government, strikes me as only slightly less valuable than a tulip.… Read More
MIMO, Always On, 3D Imaging and Computer Vision…
You can read all these articles in the latest CEVA Newsletter, if you didn’t read it first in Semiwiki! The blog describing the “Maximum Likelihood MIMO Implementation” is certainly going deep technically, as it introduce a complex Digital Signal Processing technique, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). MIMO is just like… Read More
The Grand Folly of India’s Foundry Plans
At the beginning of the year, New Delhi’s outgoing government launched an initiative purported to drive the nation’s technology independence and reduce the current account deficit on electronics imports. The initiative describes a partnership between New Delhi and two industrial consortiums for the building of semiconductor… Read More
Sonics and Qualcomm Make a Deal
Some background. Sonics has been in the network-on-chip (NoC) business for a long time. Nearly 18 years years. When Arteris launched their products, Sonics figured Arteris were infringing Sonics’s patents and in 2011 brought a complaint against them. Details are here. Arteris looked at a couple of their own patents (if… Read More
Why NA is Not Relevant to Resolution in EUV Lithography