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The Wireless Business Unit (WBU) from TI was created in the mid 90’s to structure the chip business in wireless handset made with customers like Nokia, Ericsson or Alcatel. I had a deep look at the WBU results: quickly growing from $1B in 2000 to reach about $5B in 2005… to finally decrease by 70%, down to $1.3B in 2012.
Let’s make it clear:… Read More
The Linley Group’s Microprocessor conference in Spring is focused on Datacenters now that cloud computing and massive internal datacenters has made them so important. The conference is on February 5th and 6th. It is free to qualified people such as network equipment vendors, network service providers and so on (which … Read More
In his blog Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood wrote: “Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code. But it’s not. Their job is to solve problems.” Whether the tool is HTML, C, or RTL, the reality is we are now borrowing or buying more software IP than ever, and integrating it into more complex designs,… Read More
Non-volatile memory is used in a wide variety of consumer and industrial applications and comes in an array of architectures like Serial Flash and CBRAM (Conductive Bridging RAM). I caught up with Shane Hollmer by phone this week to gain some insight into a recent acquisition of Atmel’s serial flash components, and how that… Read More
I sat down last week for lunch with Michael Sanie. Mike and I go back a long way, working together at VLSI Technology (where his first job out of school was to take over the circuit extractor that I’d originally written) and then in strategic marketing at Cadence. Now Mike has marketing for (almost?) all of Synopsys’s … Read More
Over at the GSA Forum website I have an article on the history of the semiconductor industry. It is actually based on a couple of brief history of semiconductor blogs (here and here) I published here on SemiWiki last year but edited down a lot and tightened up.
Since the start of the year seems to be the time for predictions, here are the… Read More
PCI Express 3.0 increased the supported data rate to 8 Gbps, which effectively doubles the data rate supported by PCI Express 2.0. While the data rate was increased, no improvement was made to the channels. As such, an 8 Gbps channel in PCIe 3.0 experiences significantly more loss than one implemented in PCIe 2.0. To compensate for… Read More
While this iconic advertising phrase was first used to describe the ink reliability of a ballpoint pen, it perfectly summarizes the average consumer’s attitude toward automobile reliability as well. We don’t really care how it’s done, as long as everything in our car works first time, every time. Even when that includes heated… Read More
TSMC and Synopsys hosted a webinar in December on this topic of double patterning and how it impacts the IC extraction flow. The 20nm process node has IC layout geometries so closely spaced that the traditional optical-based lithography cannot be used, instead lower layers like Poly and Metal 1 require a new approach of using two… Read More
This is the second blog entry about an ST Ericsson white-paper on multiprocessors in mobile. The first part was here.
The first part of the white-paper basically shows that for mobile the optimal number of cores is two. It is much better to use process technology (and good EDA) to run the processor at higher frequency rather than add… Read More
Will 50% of New High Performance Computing (HPC) Chip Designs be Multi-Die in 2025?