I recently received a copy of a book entitled Silicon Photonics III (Amazon) and while perusing the book I was captured by the first chapter entitled ‘Silicon Optical Interposers for High-Density Optical Interconnects’. The chapter covered the work of a team in Japan on an idea they termed “on-chip servers” and “on-board data … Read More
Tag: arm
Fit-for-purpose IoT ASICs are about more than cost
We’ve been saying for a while that it looks like there is a resurgence in design starts for ASICs targeting the IoT. A recent webinar featuring speakers from ARM and Open Silicon (and moderated by Daniel Nenni) affirms this trend, and provides some insight on how these designs may differ from typical microcontrollers.
One of my first… Read More
Can Qualcomm avoid repeating Motorola’s fate?
NPR had an interesting guest this morning: Edward Luce, author of “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent”. I’m not about to turn SemiWiki into a politics blog, but there is some precedent in the technology business. I’ve caught myself saying more than once recently that “Motorola is no longer the company I worked 14… Read More
Upcoming ARM & Open-Silicon Webinar on Custom SOC’s for IoT
IoT products call for a higher level of system integration than ever before. Companies seeking to go to market now have a much higher bar in terms of size, power, reliability and manufacturability. The first IoT devices evolved from embedded development boards, like the groundbreaking Arduino. These were fine for prototypes … Read More
New CEVA X baseband architecture takes on multi-RAT
What we think of as a “baseband processor” for cellular networks is often comprised of multiple cores. Anecdotes suggest to handle the different signal processing requirements for 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, some SoC designs use three different DSPs plus a control processor such as an ARM core. That’s nuts. What is the point of having… Read More
A Real Engineering Challenge – Artificial Red Blood Cells
When you’re thinking about “what can we do next”, you can think big or you can think small – very, very small. Robert Freitas at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing (IMM) has such an idea – artificial red blood cells (RBCs). These would be nano-machines which could augment the oxygen and carbon dioxide carrying capacity of … Read More
IP Vendor Nabs Top Talent from Semiconductor Industry
The growth of mobile and IoT have helped increase the demand for One Time Programmable Non Volatile Memory (OTP NVM) as a solution for on-chip storage. To continue to meet this demand and grow with it, industry leading Sidense has recently brought on board seasoned semiconductor executive Ken Wagner as VP of Engineering. He was … Read More
ARM on Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?
On Monday morning on December 7, 2016 Greg Yeric of Arm gave an excellent and wide ranging plenary talk at IEDM entitled “Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?”. You can download Greg’s slide deck here.… Read More
Privacy – the Other Face of Security
Security gets a lot of tech press, privacy not so much. A lot of the problem is that while we each know intuitively what we mean by privacy, pinning down an actionable definition is surprisingly tricky, especially when we require that it not intrude in other ways on our rights. Privacy rights are not absolute (you don’t have … Read More
NIGHTWATCH Smart Halter: A Great Example of ARM’s IoT Ecosystem Innovation And Diversity
We’ve all seen examples over the past few years of complex IoT technology solutions to help solve real-world problems from a variety of small companies. In fact, last year while I was at the ARM Holdings annual industry analyst conference and TechCon, a gathering of the ARM ecosystem powers, you could find hundreds, if not thousands… Read More