China (and Cupertino) Are Killing Korea in Mobile

China (and Cupertino) Are Killing Korea in Mobile
by Paul McLellan on 08-04-2015 at 7:00 am

Samsung, #1 in the mobile phones based on unit shipments, has two big problems in mobile. Apple’s iPhone; and China in general and Huawei in particular in the Android world where they live. They have just announced their fifth quarter of decline. Revenue was down 8% year on year but operating profit declined 38%. They sold … Read More


Apple Took All the Money

Apple Took All the Money
by Paul McLellan on 07-20-2015 at 4:00 pm

Apple has roughly 20% market share of the smartphone unit shipments. Android has pretty much all the rest with a tiny sliver for Microsoft Windows Phone, Blackberry, and Samsung’s Tizen. By any standard, Android is the highest volume operating system ever created. Famously, Microsoft makes more money on patent licenses… Read More


Unlock the Key to Ultra-Low Power Design

Unlock the Key to Ultra-Low Power Design
by Tom Simon on 06-20-2015 at 7:00 am

We have been hearing about low power for a long time. Fortunately, low power chip operation has come about through a large number of innovations. Key among these is clock gating, frequency and voltage scaling, managing leakage with lower threshold voltage, HKMG, and many other techniques. But we are entering the age of ultra low… Read More


NVIDIA and Qualcomm Talk about High Level Synthesis, Samsung on Low Power for Mobile

NVIDIA and Qualcomm Talk about High Level Synthesis, Samsung on Low Power for Mobile
by Daniel Payne on 05-31-2015 at 4:00 pm

Since 1978 I’ve seen many trends in the semiconductor design world: transistor-level IC design, gate-level design, RTL coding, High Level Synthesis (HLS) and IP re-use. We’ve witnessed the growth in design productivity enabling chips starting with just thousands of transistor all the way up to billions of transistors… Read More


Smartphones in Q1. Sammy Back On Top

Smartphones in Q1. Sammy Back On Top
by Paul McLellan on 05-04-2015 at 7:00 pm

Because it is such a major impact on the semiconductor industry, being the largest and fastest growing market ever, I follow the ups and down of the mobile industry. So what happened in Q1?

Total shipments are up 2% to a record (for Q1) 440 million units but that is down 16% from Q4 which remains the biggest quarter ever.

First thing is… Read More


Linley: Mobile Peaked in 2013?

Linley: Mobile Peaked in 2013?
by Paul McLellan on 04-28-2015 at 7:00 am

Last week was the Linley Mobile Conference. Mobile is a huge semiconductor market and, outside of Intel, is the main driver for next generation process technologies. A new generation of mobile phones comes along, fills the leading edge fabs for a year or two and then moves on to the next generation. Nothing comes close to requiring… Read More


SecurCore: Modern Hardware Security Approach

SecurCore: Modern Hardware Security Approach
by admin on 04-20-2015 at 7:00 pm

The increasing number of interconnected devices grows day by day and has slowly begun expansion into other consumer products. The need for safe, efficient, and reliable systems that meet modern user expectations has become increasingly important as a result. SoC engineers addressing these challenges must consider design … Read More


Linley Mobile Microprocessor Conference

Linley Mobile Microprocessor Conference
by Paul McLellan on 03-31-2015 at 7:00 am

As The Who sang on Who’s Next:Keep me movin’, groovin’, groovin’, yeah
Movin’, Yeah
Mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile, …

On April 22nd and 23rd the place to be moving (or movin’) to will be the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. Because What’s Next is this year’s Linley Mobile ConferenceRead More


Intel and Samsung in Barcelona

Intel and Samsung in Barcelona
by Paul McLellan on 03-06-2015 at 7:00 am

This week it was Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Everyone who is anyone in mobile is there. Unfortunately I’m not since Barcelona is one of my favorite cities to visit. Two companies that set high expectations before the show were Samsung and Intel.

Samsung announced the new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge smartphones on Sunday.… Read More


New CEVA-XM4 vision IP does point clouds and more

New CEVA-XM4 vision IP does point clouds and more
by Don Dingee on 02-27-2015 at 6:00 am

When Intel created the OpenCV vision processing library, the idea was algorithms could take advantage of the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) capability in Intel architecture processors. (Intel’s ulterior motive is always to sell processors.) As the library has matured, optimized functions take advantage of SSE or… Read More