It’s amazing to think that Apollo moon mission used computers that were based on magnetic core memories. Of course, CMOS memories superseded them rapidly. However, over the decades since, memory technologies have advanced significantly, in terms of density, power and new types of technologies, e.g NAND Flash. Ever since the… Read More
Arguably the cloud was the quickest road to riches for chip designers large and small. As an emerging company, if you wanted to raise money just put “Datacenter” in your pitch deck and you were assured millions. You would be competing with semiconductor’s version of David and Goliath (AMD and Intel) but that was a good thing, right?… Read More
In a joint presentation given by Samsung, Arm, and Cadence at the Arm TechCon event on October 9, 2019, Cadence showed some results and explained its collaboration project used to implement the new Arm Hercules CPU on Samsung’s advanced 5LPE process. I do not want to minimize the significance of Samsung’s and Arm’s participation… Read More
I previously blogged on the GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) Technology Conference (GTC) held in Santa Clara, CA. The main takeaway that I shared in that blog was that GF’s announced “pivot” to a specialty foundry announced over a year ago, including its decision not to pursue 7nm and smaller nodes, appears to be working and GF is gaining momentum.… Read More
On Wednesday, October 9, 2019, I had the pleasure of spending the day at ARM Techcon at the San Jose Convention Center. In the morning, in addition to getting some sneak peeks into the exhibitor area, I attended some of the morning keynote presentations, which focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) topics.… Read More
The server market has been undergoing changes in the last few years. The traditional go-to for server processors had been x86 based chips from Intel or AMD. However, if you go on Amazon AWS looking for EC2 instances, you will see the “A1” instance type, which is an ARM based instance. This is not what you might think at first. The A1 instance… Read More
As more than 343 people (and counting) know, we will be releasing the 2019 updated PDF version of our first book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” via handout at a live webinar. The response has been overwhelming and I want to personally thank you. The webinar will be a brief overview of the book with a question… Read More
Arm is a machine. They crank out new products in a wide range of categories, Project Trillium for AI, Neoverse for infrastructure, their Automotive Enhanced line and the Pelion IoT platform. And in each they have a regular beat of new product introductions following roadmaps they have already laid out. Not that you’d expect any … Read More
The entire history of EDA software tools has enabled engineers to design ICs and SoCs using virtual prototyping, so most of us in the industry are familiar with the idea of modeling and simulating something as complex as an IC before actually starting the manufacturing process. In a complex system like an automobile there are a lot… Read More
…but ARM, Imagination, MIPS or Ceva have declined and lose market share. Semiconductor design IP market is still doing good in 2018, with 6% growth year over year. It’s half the growth rate seen in 2017, 2016 and 2015 and the growth decline is imputable to bad results from ARM, the market leader, but also from Imagination (#4), MIPS… Read More
