If I had to sum up opening day at ARM TechCon 2013 in one word it would be “crowded”. More than twice as many people attended as last year with 6,500 preregistered. The opening keynote was “The New Style of IT” pimping the HP Moonshot systems, but it could have just as easily been called “Why Intel Stock is Dead Money”,… Read More





Qualcomm and Arteris: the CEO Speaks
Arteris finally announced this morning, as rumored, that Qualcomm is acquiring “certain technology assets” and hired personnel formerly employed by Arteris. The financial terms were not disclosed.
I talked to Charlie Janac, the CEO, today. The first thing I asked him is why such a convoluted deal, I’ve never… Read More
Device Noise Analysis of Switched-Cap Circuits
Switched-capacitor circuits are used in most CMOS mixed-signal ICs as:
- Track and hold circuits
- Integrators
- Operational Amplifiers
- Delta-sigma modulators
Delta-Sigma Modulator: IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 43, no. 12, pp 2601-2612, Dec. 2008… Read More
Qualcomm Arteris deal
Is it really a surprise if Qualcomm, the undisputed leader of Application Processor (AP) and BaseBand (BB) IC for wireless mobile, already one of the Arteris investors (with ARM, Synopsys, Docomo Capital and a bunch of VC), eventually acquires the best NoC IP technology (the technology, the engineering team and the rights, but… Read More
M-PCIe, Data Converters, and USB 3.0 SSIC at IP SoC 2013
Synopsys is taking IP-SOC 2013 seriously, as the company will hold several presentations, starting with a Keynote: “Virtual Prototyping – A Reality Check”, by Johannes Stahl, Director, Product Marketing, System-Level Solutions, Synopsys, highlighting current industry practice around putting virtual prototyping to work… Read More
ARM in Samsung 14nm FinFET
I am at ARM TechCon today. One interesting presentation was made jointly between Samsung, Cadence and ARM themselves about developing physical libraries (ARM), a tool flow (Cadence) and test chips (Samsung). It was titled Samsung ARM and Cadence collaborate on the silicon-proven world first 14-nm FinFET Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and… Read More
What you compress may not be all you get
Now that we’ve looked at the basics, we wrap up this three-part series exploring PVRTC texture compression. We’ll take a brief look at PVRTC2, the latest version of the technology, and then explore the issues behind visual quality from several different angles.
PVRTC2 is supported on the newest Series5XT or Series6 GPU cores from… Read More
The Alternative to FinFET: FD-SOI
Everywhere you turn these days you find FinFETs. Intel has had them since 22nm (they use the word Tri-gate but it is the same as what the world calls FinFET) and TSMC will have them at 16nm. So why FinFET? And is there an alternative?
The reason that regular bulk planar transistors have run out of steam is that the channel area underneath… Read More
ARC EM SEP Processor, Safety Ready Solution for Automotive
If you are familiar with Processor IP core, you certainly know DesignWare ARC EM4 core, 32-bit CPU that SoC designers can optimize for a wide range of uses, and differentiate by using patented configuration technology to tailor each ARC core instance to meet specific performance, power and area requirements. If you develop a product… Read More
Social Media at Mentor Graphics
You can often tell how important blogging and social media is to an EDA company by how much effort it takes to find their blog from the Home page. For the folks at Mentor Graphics I’d say that blogging is quite important, because it shows up as a top-level menu item. Notice also how important Twitter is, their latest tweets show… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside