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After 10 years promoting crossbar switch for interconnects, Sonics finally admit that NoC is better

After 10 years promoting crossbar switch for interconnects, Sonics finally admit that NoC is better
by Eric Esteve on 10-15-2012 at 11:27 am

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

Apple and The Road Ahead to Building an x86 Processor
by Ed McKernan on 10-15-2012 at 9:00 am


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

A brief History of Mobile: Generations 1 and 2
by Paul McLellan on 10-14-2012 at 9:00 pm

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

Power Integrity Challenges for High Speed and High Frequency Designs
by Daniel Nenni on 10-14-2012 at 8:30 pm

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

Advanced Node Design Webinar Series
by Daniel Nenni on 10-14-2012 at 8:15 pm


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-Accurate Mixed-Signal Fractional-N PLL IP Design Paper
by Daniel Nenni on 10-12-2012 at 8:00 am

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

Dear Meg, HP is Still a Goner
by Ed McKernan on 10-11-2012 at 9:30 pm


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’s Use of Virtual Platforms
by Paul McLellan on 10-11-2012 at 9:00 pm

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

A Brief History of Moore’s Law
by Sam Beal on 10-11-2012 at 9:00 pm


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
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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