St. Francis Xavier said “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” ARM is not going for them quite that young but this week they announced their “lab in a box” for participating universities worldwide. It is actually a joint launch between the ARM University Program (which is not new)… Read More
Tag: arm
Baskin-Robbins Only has 31 Flavors. Atmel has 505 Microcontrollers
Actually these days even Baskin-Robbins has more, but not 505. But as it says in the title, Atmel have 505 different microcontrollers. That’s a lot. Some are AVR, both 8 bit and 32 bit, and some are various flavors of ARM (all 32 bit) ranging from older parts like the ARM9 to various flavors of Cortex ranging from the M0 (tiny microcontroller… Read More
Carbon Design Systems – Secret of Success
Last week, after learning from the press releaseof Carbonabout its rocking sustained growth with record-breaking revenue and a thumping 46% increase in bookings, I was interested to know some more details about what drives Carbon to such an amazing performance in an EDA market that is generally prone to growth of a few percentage… Read More
Happy Birthday Xilinx
I have never done this before, wished a company happy birthday. So here goes, Happy Birthday Xilinx! How does it feel to be 30? Looking good eh? Signing up for AARP? My family and I just sang and had cake and ice cream. They did look at me like I was nuts when I set a place at the table for a Xilinx FPGA. In all seriousness, over the years Xilinx… Read More
ASTC and the new midrange ARM Mali-T720 GPU
When we last visited texture compression technology for OpenGL ES on mobile GPUs, we mentioned Squish image quality results in passing, but weren’t able to explore a key technology at the top of the results. With today’s introduction of the ARM Mali-T720 GPU IP, let’s look at the texture compression technology inside: Adaptive… Read More
ARM Announces A17
It is microprocessors all the time right now, with Linley last week. Today ARM announced the next generation Cortex-A17 core. It is a development built on the Cortex-A12 core, itself built on A7 (which is the current volume leader). ARM says that it is 60% faster than the A7 core, although I’m sure a lot of that gain is a process… Read More
A Brief History of Qualcomm
Qualcomm is the largest fabless semiconductor company in the world. If you have a smarphone there is a good chance you have a Qualcomm chip in your pocket. It is headquartered in San Diego with offices pretty much everywhere.
Qualcomm’s roots are in Linkabit, which was founded by Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi. They, along with … Read More
The Semiconductor Landscape – III
In continuation to my earlier observations and anticipations (landscape1, landscape2) which came up to my expectations, I was further inspired to ponder over the macros of our ever growing semiconductor industry. We may argue the business is stagnating, we may argue that the pace of scaling is slowing, but when I look back at the… Read More
SilabTech Awarded 2013 Best Start-up in India
This is obviously great news for SilabTech, and this is the type of news which will change the perception that we (non-Indian) have of the Semiconductor industry in India. About 15-20 years ago, the India Embedded/VLSI industry was perceived as low cost design resource pool, a good place where to implement design center. The hidden… Read More
Intel is NOT Transparent Again!
Recent headlines suggest that Intel was not transparent about some of the products they showed at the CES keynote. Intel confirmed on Friday that they used ARM-based chips for some of the products but would not say which ones. When your company’s tag line is “Intel Inside” and you hold up a product during your keynote wouldn’t… Read More