Getting the Most Out of the ARM CoreLink™ NIC-400

Getting the Most Out of the ARM CoreLink™ NIC-400
by Daniel Payne on 10-28-2013 at 12:27 pm

SoC designers are attracted to ARM as an IP provider because of their popular offerings and growing ecosystem of EDA partners like Carbon Design Systems. At the upcoming ARM Techcon on October 31 this week in Santa Clara you’ll have an opportunity to hear a joint presentation from ARM and Carbon Design Systems on: Getting Read More


Strategic Analog IP Power Management for SoCs

Strategic Analog IP Power Management for SoCs
by Daniel Nenni on 10-27-2013 at 12:00 pm

This tutorial describes how analog IP is becoming more important in any power management strategy and shows the major analog building blocks to manage power and temperature in a SoC on leading edge technology nodes.

The tremendous demand for high-performance computing devices has led to aggressive technology scaling, allowing… Read More


ARM Signs 48 New Licenses in Q3

ARM Signs 48 New Licenses in Q3
by Paul McLellan on 10-22-2013 at 3:15 pm

ARM announced their quarterly results early this morning. ARM’s results are a funny mixture of backward looking information such as royalties which are reported a quarter late since they have to wait for their licensees to work out how many they shipped, and some very forward looking such as new licenses, which bring some… Read More


Server Shift to ARM Becomes a Stampede

Server Shift to ARM Becomes a Stampede
by Paul McLellan on 10-19-2013 at 3:00 pm

I have been at the Linley Microprocessor Conference today. This is the one that is not about mobile: about servers, networking, base-stations. Probably the most important story about the whole industry is that the “shift to ARM becomes a stampede.”


In this market it seems to be driven by the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction… Read More


Catch Mentor’s embedded sessions at ARM TechCon

Catch Mentor’s embedded sessions at ARM TechCon
by Beth Martin on 10-09-2013 at 9:00 am

For Halloween this year, why not tell your embedded software debug horror stories at ARM TechCon? Mentor will have several campfire sessions you should consider attending, but here my Halloween thread breaks down. These three sessions are all quite cheery.

This one, Software Debug on ARM Processors in Emulationis on using emulation… Read More


ST Endorses PowerArtist with ARM Cores & FDSOI libs

ST Endorses PowerArtist with ARM Cores & FDSOI libs
by Pawan Fangaria on 10-01-2013 at 12:00 pm

It was an interesting webinar I attended, presented by STMicroelectronicson how they are benefited in power saving and thermal dissipation by using FDSOI technology and also by using PowerArtist in their design. So, it’s an advantage from both sides – semiconductor technology and semiconductor design tool. It’s worth attending… Read More


TSMC’s 16FinFET and 3D IC Reference Flows

TSMC’s 16FinFET and 3D IC Reference Flows
by Paul McLellan on 09-17-2013 at 2:01 am

Today TSMC announced three reference flows that they have been working on along with various EDA vendors (and ARM and perhaps other IP suppliers). The three new flows are:

  • 16FinFET Digital Reference Flow. Obviously this has full support for non-planar FinFET transistors including extraction, quantized pitch placement, low-vdd
Read More

How to Design an LTE Modem

How to Design an LTE Modem
by Paul McLellan on 09-16-2013 at 4:24 pm

Designing an LTE modem is an interesting case study in architectural and system level design because it is pretty much on the limit of what is possible in a current process node such as 28nm. I talked to Johannes Stahl of Synopsys about how you would accomplish this with the Synopsys suite of system level tools. He is the first to admit… Read More


Intel Quark: Synthesizable Core?

Intel Quark: Synthesizable Core?
by Paul McLellan on 09-10-2013 at 1:43 pm

At IDF Brian Krzanich gave the keynote. I won’t summarize the whole thing here but just talk about one part that was something they had actually managed to keep secret ahead of time: Quark.

Quark is a synthesizable core. It uses 1/10th power of Atom and is 1/5 size. Now I am writing this, I don’t know if this is a fair comparison… Read More


Ecosystem: ARM versus Intel

Ecosystem: ARM versus Intel
by Daniel Nenni on 09-05-2013 at 2:45 pm

Ecosystem is everything when it comes to modern semiconductor design, especially if it is mobile. The fabless semiconductor industry has been all about ecosystem since the beginning and that is why we hold supercomputers in our hands today, believe it. After the invention of the transistor in 1947, and the invention of the integrated… Read More