When Charlie Janac talks, people listen, absolutely. Charlie’s 30 year career spans EDA, IP, semiconductor equipment, nano-technology, and venture capital. For the last 11 years he has been CEO of interconnect IP provider Arteris who invented the industry’s first commercial network on chip (NoC) SoC interconnect IP… Read More
Robots – we have all been waiting for them since we were young. We watched Star Wars, or in the case of the slightly longer-lived of us, we watched Forbidden Planet or Lost in Space. We knew that our future robot friends would be able to move around and interact with their environment. What we did not foresee long ago was that instead of… Read More
As the size and complexity of System On Chip design has rapidly expanded in recent years, the need to use cache memory to improve throughput and reduce power has increased as well. Originally, cache memory was used to prevent what was then a single processor from making expensive off chip access for program or data memory. With the… Read More
The speed and power penalties for accessing system RAM affect everything from artificial intelligence platforms to IoT sensor nodes. There is a huge power and performance overhead when the various IP blocks in an SOC need to go to DRAM. Memory caches have become essential to SOC design to reduce these adverse effects. However, … Read More
The move to SSD storage for enterprise use brings with it the need for difficult to design enterprise capable SSD controller SOC’s. The benefits of SSD in hyperscale data centers are clear. SSD’s offer higher reliability due to the elimination of moving parts. They have a smaller foot print, use less power and offer much better performance.… Read More
It’s about 15 years the concept of IP development and its usage took place. In the recent past the semiconductor industry witnessed start of a large number of IP companies across the globe. However, according to Gary Smith’s presentation before the start of 52[SUP]nd[/SUP] DAC, IP business is expected to remain stagnant for next… Read More
The joint development of 3D XPoint memory technology from Intel and Micron has once more brought the spotlight on data centers and chips for solid-state drives (SSDs). The two semiconductor industry giants claim that 3D XPoint memory is1,000 times faster than NAND Flash: the underlying memory content for SSDs. Such developments… Read More
The interconnect technology is one of the unsung heroes of the system-on-chip (SoC) revolution. It’s the on-chip networking fabric that is used to link various IP cores on an SoC floorplan. The technology facilitates links between multiple processors, on-chip memories, hardware accelerators and more. In other words,… Read More
China was a virgin territory for Arteris Inc. before July 19, 2012 when Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics announced that it has licensed the Arteris FlexNoC network-on-chip (NoC)-based interconnect IP technology for its multicore SoCs for budget Android tablets. Rockchip mostly targets the tablet and set-top box (STB) markets … Read More
If we look back in the last century, performance and area were two main criteria for semiconductor chip design. All design tools and flows were concentrated towards optimizing those two aspects. As a result, density of chips started increasing and power became a critical factor. Now, Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are looked… Read More
