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The Protocol Processing Dataplane

The Protocol Processing Dataplane
by Paul McLellan on 10-11-2012 at 8:48 pm

At the Linley processor conference this week, Chris Rowen, the CTO of Tensilica presented on the protocol processing dataplane. That sounds superficially like he is talking about networking but in fact true protocol processing is just part of adding powerful compute features to the dataplane. Other applications are video, … Read More


ARM in Networking/Communications

ARM in Networking/Communications
by Paul McLellan on 10-11-2012 at 7:15 pm

I was at the Linley Processor Conference yesterday. There are two of these each year, one focused on mobile and this one, focused on networking and communications (so routers, base-stations and the like). You probably know that ARM is pretty dominant in mobile handsets (and Intel is trying to get a toe-hold although I’m skeptical… Read More


Challenges in Managing Power Consumption of Mobile SoC Chipsets: And What Lies Ahead When Your Hand-Held Is Your Compute Device!

Challenges in Managing Power Consumption of Mobile SoC Chipsets: And What Lies Ahead When Your Hand-Held Is Your Compute Device!
by Daniel Nenni on 10-10-2012 at 6:00 pm

Qualcomm VP of Engineering, Charlie Matar, will be keynoting the Apache/ANSYS seminar in Santa Clara next Thursday. Charlie is a great guy and a great speaker so you won’t want to miss this and it’s FREE! I spoke to Charlie, he will be speaking on:

Today’s complex SOC design is driven by the constant demand for high performanceRead More


Hynix View on New, Emerging Memories

Hynix View on New, Emerging Memories
by Ed McKernan on 10-10-2012 at 11:11 am


The recent (August) flash memory summit in Santa Clara had a session devoted to ReRAM as well as featuring prominently in the keynote address by Sung Wook Park of SK Hynix. The talk includes a summary of NAND’s well known scaling issues along with approaches to 3D NAND. It turns out that they are working on three different technologies:… Read More


Tensilica Ships 2 Billionth Core

Tensilica Ships 2 Billionth Core
by Paul McLellan on 10-10-2012 at 7:00 am

It was in June of last year that Tensilica announced that they (or rather their licensees) had shipped one billion cores. Now they have just announced that they have shipped two billion cores. They are shipping at a run-rate of 800 million cores per year, which is 50% higher than June last year. If business continues to grow they will… Read More


The Middle is A Bad Place to Be if You’re a CPU Board

The Middle is A Bad Place to Be if You’re a CPU Board
by Don Dingee on 10-09-2012 at 10:45 pm

In a discussion with one of my PR network recently, I found myself thinking out loud that if the merchant SoC market is getting squeezed hard, that validates something I’ve been thinking – the merchant CPU board market is dying from the middle out.… Read More


ICCAD: 30 years

ICCAD: 30 years
by Paul McLellan on 10-09-2012 at 9:00 pm

ICCAD is November 5th to 8th in the Hilton San Jose (downtown).

It is very off topic, but if you are British then November 5th is the rough equivalent of July 4th when there are fireworks displays all over the country. Britain is one of very few countries that transitioned from some sort of autocracy to a democracy without having a revolution.… Read More


How Big is Mobile? Twice as many people use mobile phones than use a toothbrush

How Big is Mobile? Twice as many people use mobile phones than use a toothbrush
by Paul McLellan on 10-09-2012 at 3:47 pm

How big is mobile? Well, sometime early next year (or maybe even in the Christmas surge) there will be more mobile phones than people. Technically that is subscribers, so some of those “phones” are actually spare SIM-cards in international travelers’ pockets. But even so that is an incredible statistic. Also,… Read More


Soft IP Quality Standards

Soft IP Quality Standards
by Paul McLellan on 10-09-2012 at 1:08 pm

As SoC design has transformed from being about writing RTL and more towards IP assembly, the issue of IP quality has become increasingly important. In 2011 TSMC and Atrenta launched the soft IP qualification program. Since then, 13 partners have joined the program.

IP quality is multi-faceted but at the most basic level, an IP block… Read More


Designing with FinFETs

Designing with FinFETs
by Daniel Payne on 10-08-2012 at 6:13 pm

Intel is the number one semiconductor company in the world and has taken the lead in bringing FinFET (aka Tri-Gate) silicon to market at the 22nm node starting in May 2011, so now we see the pure play foundries playing catch-up and start talking about their own FinFET roadmaps. IC designers and layout engineers want to know how their… Read More