Network on Chip (NoC) technology is probably one of the most fascinating new concepts that has been developed and is implemented in real chips. NoC can be integrated into various System on Chip (SOC), targeting several market segment: Video Processing, Consumer Electronics, Automotive, Networking, Multimedia (digital TV),… Read More
Apple and The Road Ahead to Building an x86 Processor
A small blurb last week announced that Apple had hired Jim Mergard away from Samsung after just 15 months on the job. Previously to that he was a 16-year AMD veteran who headed up their low power x86 Brazos processor team. In near synchronicity, AMD hired Famed Apple Designer Jim Keller to be its chief microprocessor architect. When… Read More
A brief History of Mobile: Generations 1 and 2
Mobile is one of the biggest markets for semiconductor, especially if you count not just mobile handsets but also the base-station infrastructure. No technology has ever been adopted so fast and so completely. There are approximately the same number of mobile phone accounts as there are people in the world. A few people have more… Read More
Power Integrity Challenges for High Speed and High Frequency Designs
There is an interesting discussion on the LinkedIn SoC Power Integrity Group in regards to the power integrity challenges for high speed and high frequency designs. More specifically, the additional attention an on-chip power delivery network (PDN) requires as the operating frequency of ICs and SoCs increases.
The PDN has to… Read More
Advanced Node Design Webinar Series
At advanced process nodes, variation and its effects on the design become a huge challenge. Join Cadence® Virtuoso® experts for a series of technical webinars on variation-aware design. Learn how to use advanced technologies and tools to analyze and understand the affects of variation. We’ll introduce you to the latest Virtuoso… Read More
Silicon-Accurate Mixed-Signal Fractional-N PLL IP Design Paper
Silicon Creations will be presenting a paper with Berkeley Design Automation at the TSMC Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum next week where TSMC’s design ecosystem member companies and customers share real-case solutions for design challenges within TSMC’s design ecosystem:
This presentation will describe … Read More
Dear Meg, HP is Still a Goner
A year ago, Meg Whitman decided it was time to venture back into the business world by grabbing onto the HP CEO baton from a badly wounded Leo Apotheker. What for? My best guess is to enter the Pantheon of Great Turnaround CEOs of failing companies, best exemplified by the work of Lou Gerstner with IBM in the early 1990s. It comes too late… Read More
Altera’s Use of Virtual Platforms
Altera have been making use of Synopsys’s virtual platform technology to accelerate the time to volume by letting software development proceed in parallel with semiconductor development so that the software development does not need to wait until availability of hardware.
In the past, creating the virtual platform … Read More
A Brief History of Moore’s Law
I recently read a news article where the author referred to Moore’s Law as a ‘Law of Science discovered by an Intel engineer’. Readers of SemiWiki would call that Dilbertesque. Gordon Moore was Director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1965 when he published his now-famous paper on integrated electronic… Read More
The Protocol Processing Dataplane
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
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay