Just in time for DAC, Carbon have announced that they have expanded their partnership with ARM to create and deliver models for the ARM Cortex-A57 processor and related IP. One piece of related IP is the Cortex-A53 which can be configured in big.LITTLE multi-core setups to achieve the sweet spot of higher performance and lower power.… Read More
Last year at DACI discovered a physical IP company called DXCorrthat competed against giant ARM. This year the company has selected a different direction, so I got caught up with Nirmalya Ghosh, the CEO to hear about the changes.
Nirmalya Ghosh, DXCorr
… Read More
Recently, Sonics and ARM entered into an agreement whereby ARM licensed a significant portion of Sonics’ patent portfolio. Sonics, Inc. is one of the leading providers of connectivity IP often referred to as network-on-chip, or NoC. ARM is the leading provider of processor intellectual property (IP). The potential scope… Read More
It was a generation ago when Intel, less than three years old, created the three fundamental building blocks of the compute era: the DRAM, the EPROM and the Microprocessor, an incredible feat of innovation by any measure. Manufacturing yield, not power or performance determined success of failure and in the first two … Read More
With nearly twenty five years in business, Tanner EDA Application Engineers have seen a wide range of support requests. One consistent topic area is around design data management and design reuse. In one recent instance, our customer, an IDM who produces imaging sensors for infrared vision systems, called on Tanners AE team for… Read More
This year for the first time the Thursday of DAC is tranining day. So that would be June 6th in Austin, of course. There are four tracks of training focused on SystemC, ARM Cortex and two on SystemVerilog, all areas of increasing use in SoC design, especially in mobile.
Each track of training is divided into two parts, one held from 9am… Read More
Most SoC designs these days consist largely, but not entirely, of purchased IP blocks. But there are lots of tradeoffs involved in selecting IP blocks, and since those tradeoffs change with process node, even decisions that seem “obvious” based on the last generation of the design, may not be so clear cut. Even if you… Read More
The last session of the day for Linley Mobile was about processors to go into smartphones. One surprise was that there is a core that nobody seems to have heard of since it is only really used in Taiwan up until now, and it is used in several Mediatek chips.
The most “glamorous” processor in a smartphone is the one in the application… Read More
I was at the Linley Mobile Microprocessor conference earlier in the week. Well, just the first day since the second day overlapped with the GSA Silicon Summit. The first surprise was seeing Mike Demler in a suit. It turns out that he has joined the Linley Group as a full-time analyst in the mobile space.
Linley Gwennap started the day… Read More
Vince Hu of Altera presented us her at the GlobalPress Electronics Summit on their process roadmap. Since just a month or two ago they announced that Intel would be their foundry at 14nm, everyone wanted to get a better idea of what was really going on.
At 28nm, Altera use 2 processes, TSMC 28HP (for high end Stratix-5 devices) and TSMC… Read More
