Technology often goes in cycles. Thirty years ago the dominant mode of computing was a shared computing resource with comparatively dumb terminals. Think of a Vax accessed by terminals. Then workstations and the PC came along and the dominant mode became a computer on everyone’s desk. Then the smartphone came along and … Read More
Tag: noc
NoC IP boosts SoC reliability, fault tolerance
System-on-chip (SoC) devices are increasingly becoming more complex in terms of adding functionality yet they need to be more reliable and fault tolerant for automotive, aerospace and industrial electronics.
Arteris Inc.—which invented the network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect technology back in 2006—is now offering FlexNoC… Read More
NoC 101, a Sonics Webinar
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
How Sonics Uses Jasper Formal Verification
The Jasper part of Cadence announced jointly with Sonics a relationship whereby Sonics uses JasperGold Apps as part of their verification. I talked to Drew Wingard, the CTO, about how they use it.
One way is during the day when their design engineers use Jasper as part of their verification arsenal. Interestingly it is the design… Read More
Agile IC Development
If you have been involved in software development you have probably heard of the “waterfall” development methodology. This is the approach whereby a complete specification of the software is developed before a single line of code is written. Nowadays, few people develop software that way since it is too slow. And… Read More
Improve Your Memory the Sonics Way
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
S-engine Moves up the Integration of IPs into SoCs
As the semiconductor design community is seeing higher and higher levels of abstraction with standard IPs and other complex, customized IPs and sub-systems integrated together at the system level, sooner than later we will find SoCs to be just assemblies of numerous IPs selected off-the-self according to the design needs and… Read More
Sonics and Qualcomm Make a Deal
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
Dark Silicon
One of the problems with chips today is that of so-called “dark silicon”. We can put massive functionality on an SoC today. A billion transistors, and that is just at 28nm. But power constraints (both leakage and dynamic power) limit how much of the chip can be powered up at any one time. In some cases this is not that big… Read More
On-chip Firewall
We have had the Snowden revelations that the NSA has gone rogue, Target lost a zillion credit cards, the Heartbleed bug meaning that main security protocol of the internet had been coded up wrong for a couple of years, theft of records from RSA and more. One result is that people do not completely trust a security system that depends… Read More