In the late 1990s, a change was going on in chip design. Companies had moved to system-on-chip design, which incorporated a general-purpose control processor plus blocks of logic (often called RTL) to do the hard tasks that the general-purpose processor couldn’t handle.
These blocks of logic were becoming a huge problem because… Read More
Low power is the hottest topic these days. The designers of hardware and software are trying to find instances where they can save power . This article tries to identify the role that can be played by the hardware which traditionally it is always software who drives it.… Read More
One of the comments to previous installments of this series was that there isn’t much left for the merchant suppliers of smart mobile SoCs, considering Apple and Samsung have majority share and design their own parts. The theory is this makes it hard for many suppliers to continue investing at the resource levels needed to bring … Read More
Apple’s legal victory over Samsung has been analyzed in thousands of articles and TWEETs since last Friday’s announcement and surely more will follow. Most of the commentary has focused on the first order impact to handset manufacturers. It is not entirely clear how it will all settle but there are sure to be secondary ramifications… Read More
When I worked for virtual platform companies, one of the things that I used to tell prospective customers was that virtual prototypes were not some second-rate approach to software and hardware development to be dropped the moment real silicon was available, that in many ways they were better than the real hardware since they had… Read More
Interesting to note; our cell phones today have more computing power than NASA had for the first landing on the moon. The insides of these mobile devices that we can’t live without are not like personal computers or even laptops with a traditional CPU (central processing unit) and a dozen other support chips. The brain, heart, and… Read More
It is important to note that the System On Chip (SoC) revolution that is currently driving mobile electronics has one very important enabling technology and that is Semiconductor Intellectual Property. Where would we be without the $6B+ commercial semiconductor IP market segment? Computers and phones would still be on our desks… Read More
The Mobile Tsunami wave has yet to crest and the surfers strong enough to mount it are dwindling fast to the dismay of market watchers and experienced analysts. The distraction of these past few days is the courtroom drama being played out between the sumo wrestlers, Apple and Samsung, which in the end will not result in a cessation… Read More
Increasingly at DAC and other shows, EDA companies such as Jasper are having their customers present their experiences with the products. Everyone has seen marketing people present wonderful visions of the future that turn out not to materialize. But a customer speaking about their own experiences has a credibility that an EDA… Read More
Fabless semiconductor ecosystem bellwethers, TSMC and ARM, buck the trend reporting solid second quarters. Following “TSMC Reports Second Highest Quarterly Profit“, the British ARM Holdings “Outperforms Industry to Beat Forecasts“. Clearly the tabloid press death of the fabless ecosystem claims… Read More
