The world is changing and IC companies need to adapt to this to stay competitive — moving to systems (hardware and software) vs. just product (hardware). Three key trends that are underway that change the way IC vendors need to think about their customer and the customer’s customer:
At Memcon today Mike Demler of the Linley Group (and coincidentally someone who used to work for me back at Cadence and who now run Memcon, small world) gave an interesting presentation on Trends in Mobile Processors. A mobile application processor (AP) is a highly integrated SoC to run the applications in a mobile device. Mostly… Read More
Today I was at the Chinese-American Semiconductor Professionals’ Association conference and dinner. Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, gave the dinner keynote. Somewhat surreally, it was in the same room in the same conference center two weeks ago that he gave they keynote at ARM TechCon. In another coincidence, Mike Muller of … Read More
In 2005 with the development of the Arduino, everything changed for people building things that required a microcontroller. The Arduino brought with it a low price standard, and open, hardware platform and an easy to use open source development environment. It was … Read More
As you may have heard, Intel is making some interesting moves into the China mobile market. At first it had me a bit puzzled but I had some lengthy discussions about it during ARM TechCon last week so I’m ready to start writing. Spoiler alert: This will be pro Intel so please sit down and take some deep breaths before reading.
The first… Read More
It was back in April that GlobalFoundries and Samsung announced that GF would license Samsung’s 14nm process to run in their Fab8 in upstate New York. Since then there has not really been any news and of course those of us that follow the foundry industry wondered to what extent there was real substance to the agreement or if … Read More
This week is the 10[SUP]th[/SUP] annual ARM Technical Conference in Silicon Valley. In regards to size, content, and relevance, I believe ARM TechCon is the #1 event for the fabless semiconductor ecosystem for sure. I attended keynotes, sessions, and walked the hallways on Wednesday and Thursday. I wish I could write about everything… Read More
Earlier this year, when I was looking at Carbon’spast year performance which provided record breaking revenue with whopping jump in bookings, one thing was certain that Carbon Performance Analysis Kits (CPAKs) would drive major growth in future, not only for Carbon, but also for the semiconductor industry. It will initiate … Read More
“Who needs a 32-bit MCU?” It was a question asked a million times in the press when ARM introduced the Cortex-M family back in 2004. In fairness, that question predates the Internet of Things, with wireless sensor networks, open source code, encryption, and more needs for connected devices.… Read More
Security of embedded devices is becoming more and more important. The requirement for good protection increases as devices become more interconnected: wearable medical devices that connect to the cloud, mobile base stations that are no longer up poles but in much less physically secure areas, cars that communicate among themselves.… Read More
