Memories have always played a critical role, both in pushing the envelope on the semiconductor process development front and supporting the varied requirements of different applications and use-cases. The list of the various types of memories in use today runs long. At a gross level, we can classify memories into volatile or … Read More
Bluetooth (BT) was never a bit-player in communication but what surprised me is that is already dominating the market, at least as measured by radios sold, and is likely to extend that lead over the next 5 years. Particularly impressive is that BT already leads cellular and WiFi. This strength is certainly influenced by sales into… Read More
What we think of as a “baseband processor” for cellular networks is often comprised of multiple cores. Anecdotes suggest to handle the different signal processing requirements for 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, some SoC designs use three different DSPs plus a control processor such as an ARM core. That’s nuts. What is the point of having… Read More
DSP IP addressing modem for the mobile phone market is still the flagship product and CEVA enjoys design-win at major semiconductor account (one of them being vertical and also selling the smartphone), but the acquisition of Riviera Waves in 2014 has been a strong sign of diversification. CEVA’ port-folio includes signal processing… Read More
Back in the 1990s in the middle of the 2G GSM era, cell-phone manufacturers would display a “triangle of difficulty” with a large base labeled radio, a middle smaller part labeled baseband and a little triangle on top labelled software. The idea was that the radio was incredibly difficult, then the baseband chip and… Read More
Designing an LTE modem is an interesting case study in architectural and system level design because it is pretty much on the limit of what is possible in a current process node such as 28nm. I talked to Johannes Stahl of Synopsys about how you would accomplish this with the Synopsys suite of system level tools. He is the first to admit… Read More
