I slipped into the shadows at the back of the bar in the Tenderloin. Mid-afternoon on a weekday, almost nobody in there.
“So you’re with the NSA?” I asked.
“I can’t confirm that,” the man said.
“The Network Stealing Agency.”
“That’s not what it stands for,” he said indignantly. “It’s the National Security Agency. We ensure…well, … Read More
Earlier this week I moderated a webinar at Sonics entitled NoC 102: Using SonicsGN to Address Low Power Requirements. Drew Wingard, the CTO of Sonics, presented it. It goes without saying that power is a major concern in SoC design, not just with chips for battery powered devices but also tethered devices. A major cost of ownership… Read More
When Arteris sold key network-on-chip intellectual property and most of its human assets to Qualcomm earlier this year, it was big news. We suggested the bigger news after a restaffing effort would be a next-generation NoC release, and a new round of design wins.
Some developments were already in the pipeline. … Read More
One of the things that I’ve been telling the people at Sonics when they will listen is that they should do a bit more basic education on Networks on Chip (NoC). Sure, the people who actually use Sonics’s products care about deep details such as security and power management, but there is a whole host of designers who have… Read More
Protecting memory with ECC but leaving the rest of an SoC uncovered is like having a guard dog chained up in the back corner of your yard. If the problem happens to be in that particular spot, it’ll be dealt with, otherwise there will be a lot of barking but little actual protection.
Similarly, adding a safety-capable processor like… Read More
Flip on the TV, and a car commercial is bound to pop up shortly touting one of two technological aspects. One is center stack integration of smartphone-style applications. The other is advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) featuring cameras, radar, and other sensors helping cars … Read More
Advantages to using NoCs in SoC design are well documented: reduced routing congestion, better performance than crossbars, improved optimization and reuse of IP, strategies for system power management, and so on. What happens when NoCs move into FPGAs, or more accurately the SoC variant combining ARM cores with programmable… Read More
Most of the buzz on network-on-chip is around simplifying and scaling interconnect, especially in multicore SoCs where AMBA buses and crossbars run into issues as more and more cores enter a design. Designers may want to explore how NoCs can help with a more power-aware approach.… Read More
There is never enough memory bandwidth. Well, occasionally there is but many SoCs have lots of blocks that communicate through memory, typically off-chip DRAM. In 2001 Sonics created their first solution to this problem with MemMax technology that was incorporated into their SonicsSX product. This has been used in over 100 designs… Read More
Some background. Sonics has been in the network-on-chip (NoC) business for a long time. Nearly 18 years years. When Arteris launched their products, Sonics figured Arteris were infringing Sonics’s patents and in 2011 brought a complaint against them. Details are here. Arteris looked at a couple of their own patents (if… Read More
