All Things Semiconductor!
Synopsys seems to particularly excel at these events, whether in half-day tutorials at conferences or, as in this case, in a full-day on-site workshop. You might think there’s not much that can be added in this domain, other than to bring low-power newbies up to speed, but you’d be wrong. This event set the stage with surveys on needs… Read More
SLAM – simultaneous localization and mapping – is critical for mobile robotics and VR/AR headsets among other applications, all of which typically operate indoors where GPS or inertial measurement units are either ineffective or insufficiently accurate. SLAM is a chicken and egg problem in which the system needs to map its environment… Read More
At first glance, this seems like a ho-hum topic- just use whatever Arm or RISC-V solution you need – but think again. We’re now expecting to push an awful lot of functionality into these edge devices. Our imaginations don’t care about power, performance and cost; everything should be possible so let’s keep adding cool features.… Read More
Cellular as a method to communicate with the IoT is on a tear for obvious reasons. It’s long-range with no concerns about the lesser reach of Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, it needs no added infrastructure since it already works with 2G/3G/4G (and ultimately 5G I presume) and it’s designed for ultra-low power, supporting those devices expecting… Read More
If you are designing an SOC for an IoT application and looking to minimize power consumption, there are a lot of choices. However, more often than not, looking at reducing SRAM power is a good place to start. SRAMs can consume up to 70% of an IC’s power. SureCore, a leading memory IP supplier, offers highly optimized SRAM instances … Read More
In the superheated world of AI and Neural Nets (NN), many of us are familiar with object recognition in images: cars, pedestrians, cats and dogs and thousands of other applications. But there’s another class of applications, also growing rapidly, around audio AI. Early generations for command recognition in infotainment systems… Read More
I’ve noticed hybrid solutions popping up recently (I’m reminded of NXP’s crossover MCU released in 2017). These are generally a fairly clear indicator that market needs are shifting; what once could be solved with an application processor or controller or DSP or whatever, now needs two (or more) of these. In performance/power/price-sensitive… Read More
Since I talked recently about AWS adding access to Arm-based server instances in their cloud offering, I thought it would be interesting to look further into other Arm-based server solutions. I had a meeting with Ampere Computing at Arm TechCon. They offer server devices and are worth closer examination as a player in this game.… Read More
When we were first introduced to earbuds, in-ear speakers connected through thin wires to your phone (and earlier portable music devices), they seemed pretty convenient for private entertainment at work, while walking, exercising, doing almost anything. Until we started to realize those long dangly wires weren’t ideal. They  Read More
I wrote a while back about some of the more exotic architectures for machine learning (ML), especially for neural net (NN) training in the data center but also in some edge applications. In less hairy applications, we’re used to seeing CPU-based NNs at the low end, GPUs most commonly (and most widely known) in data centers as the workhorse… Read More
