Semiwiki 400x100 1 final

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
Read More


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