Amid burgeoning complexity of SoC verification with ever increasing hardware, software and firmware content, verification engineers are hard pressed with learning multiple tools, technologies and methodologies and still completing SoC verification with full accuracy in time. The complexity, size and diversity of SoC … Read More
Atmel (and ARM) announced yesterday that Atmel has licensed a portfolio of ARM IP for devices that require video, image and display capabilities. This portfolio includes Cortex-A7 (a 32-bit core), Mali-V500 (a video accelerator), Mali-DP500 (a display processor) and TrustZone technology (security technology). These can… Read More
I have heard about ARM processor for the very first time in 1990, when I was interviewed by ES2 Design Center manager before being hired to subcontract an ASIC design for ES2. I don’t know why, but I remember very well that he told me about two of the ES2 partners: ARM as a processor IP core provider and TSMC as a Foundry partner if, by chance,… Read More
ARM announced their Q1 results yesterday. Having just written that Intel lost $1B in mobile, I guess I could have used the title “ARM didn’t lose $1B in mobile.” They made $100M (on revenues of $300M). So let’s start off with what their results actually were and then look at what other things of interest … Read More
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
I am at ARM TechCon today. One interesting presentation was made jointly between Samsung, Cadence and ARM themselves about developing physical libraries (ARM), a tool flow (Cadence) and test chips (Samsung). It was titled Samsung ARM and Cadence collaborate on the silicon-proven world first 14-nm FinFET Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and… Read More
ARM announced several new products at DAC in a number of different spaces. In addition I got invited to a briefing with Simon Segars, 30 days from when he takes over as CEO of ARM. I asked Simon if he expected to make any major changes and he basically said ‘no’. ARM’s basic strategy in both mobile and now enterprise… Read More
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
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
TSMC announced today that together with ARM they have taped out the first ARM Cortex-A57 64-bit processor on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET technology. The two companies cooperated in the implementation from RTL to tape-out over six months using ARM physical IP, TSMC memory macros, and a commercial 16nm FinFET tool chain enabled by… Read More
