One of the most significant announcements at the consumer electronics show (CES) this week was Intel’s Medfield, an Atom-based smartphone SoC. The SoC itself is unremarkable, perhaps a little better than ARM Cortex-based SoCs in some areas, worse in others. The reason it is significant is that Motorola (soon to be Google,… Read More
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Imera Virtual Fabric
Virtual fabric sounds like something that would be good for making the emperor’s new clothes. I talked today to Les Spruiell of Imera to find out what it really is.
Anyone who has worked as either a designer or as an EDA engineer has had the problem of a customer who has a problem but can’t send you the design since it is (a)… Read More
Samsung’s Regrettable Moment and the Coming of 3D Tick Tock!
The might have beens. The shoulda’s, coulda’s, woulda’s are what launches a thousand Harvard Business School Case Studies that are meant to prepare a generation of business leaders on how to make decisions that impact the future directions of companies. Right before the 2008 financial crises (September … Read More
Kindle Touch – My Experience
Mostly I blog about EDA software however the end objective of IC design is to produce an electronic system like the Kindle Touch, a popular e-book reader from Amazon introduced in late 2011.
Tear Down
This particular model has the following components (Source: Tech Republic):
HiFi audio…in all the devices
The big challenge with audio is that there are so many standards. Some of this is for historical reasons since audio for mobile (such as mp3), for the home (Dolby 5.1) and for cell-phone voice encoding/decoding have all had very different requirements, different standard setters and so on. But gradually everything is coming together.… Read More
Synopsys, the first 25 years
Synopsys was started in 1986 and so 2011 was its 25th anniversary. They created a little timeline with some of their history. As with most companies, the earlier history is the most interesting, before it was clear what the future would bring. From 1986 to 1990 they grew to $22M in revenue, which was explosive growth. So explosive … Read More
Interface Protocols, USB3, HDMI, MIPI… the winner and losers in 2011
Releasing a new protocol like ThunderBolt, HDMI or SuperSpeed USB has not only to do with bandwidth performance or form factor of the connector as a guarantee of success. Some non-scientific parameters also play a role in the alchemy, that’s why forecasting the success of a certain protocol is such a hard task, and can’t be reduced… Read More
Economist on ARM vs Intel
The Economist has a big article (may need a subscription, can’t tell because I have one, it’s in the print edition too) about ARM versus Intel. It is an interesting read since I think it misses so much of what really drives semiconductor. It tells the story about Intel trying to get into mobile (because it’s main… Read More
VLSI 2012 in Hyderabad
Atrenta will be on a panel session at VLSI 2012 next week in Hyderabad in the center of India. Since I had a development group there over a decade ago this is actually one of the few cities in India that I have visited. Beautiful but very hot at the time I was there.
Atrenta will be represented by Sathyam Pattanam the director of engineering… Read More
Tracking the Big Semiconductor Story of 2012
It’s just a matter of time – perhaps just a few months – before the greatest mystery of the semiconductor industry is revealed and the peaceful co-existence of the Fab vs Fabless world is blown apart. An arms race was started by Intel to challenge TSMC and Samsung on who would control not only the high valued processor but soon… Read More
Intel’s Death Spiral Took Another Turn