Operating systems and Instruction Set Architectures (ISA) can have long lifespans, and I’ve been an engineering user of many ISAs since the 1970s. For mobile devices I’ve followed the rise to popularity of the ARM architecture, and then more recently the RISC-V ISA which has successfully made the leap from university… Read More
The traditional metrics for evaluating IP are performance, power, and area, commonly abbreviated as PPA. Viewed independently, PPA measures can be difficult to assess. As an example, design constraints that are purely based on performance, without concern for the associated power dissipation and circuit area, are increasingly… Read More
MediaTek (MTK) recently made the news for announcing their first leading edge SoC (Helio X30), a 32% increase in quarter over quarter sales, and an expected 30% increase for the year. Both of which deserve a closer look as we move into the second half of 2016 which should be very strong for MTK TSMC, and the fabless semiconductor ecosystem.… Read More
In the history of the fabless semiconductor industry the foundries have always been a process node or two behind the leading semiconductor manufacturers. Starting in Q1 2017, for the first time in fabless semiconductor history, the foundries will have a process node advantage. This is horrible news for some but great news for … Read More
Last Thursday at Qualcomm’s Financial Analyst Day the company made a slew of chip announcements ranging from the industry’s 1 Gbps wireless LTE modem to a custom designed smartwatch SoC and platform called “Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC”. In between those, Qualcomm also announced a few very overlooked … Read More
As the smartphone industry has begun to mature, one-upmanship among smartphone manufacturers and SoC vendors has bred a dangerous trend: ever-increasing processor core counts and the association between increased CPU core count and greater performance. This association originated as SoC vendors and OEMs have tried to find… Read More
