One of the barriers to silicon success has always been design costs, especially if you are an emerging company or targeting an emerging market such as IoT. Today design start costs are dominated by IP which is paid at the start of the project and that is after costly IP evaluations and other IP verification and integration challenges.… Read More
By now most people are quite comfortable with the idea of using an open source operating system for many computing tasks. It speaks volumes that Unix, and Linux in particular, is used in the vast majority of engineering, financial, data base, machine learning, data center, telecommunications and many other applications. It was… Read More
Having started my career during the mini computer revolution it has been an incredible journey from using computers that consumed entire rooms – to the desktop – and now we have supercomputers in our pockets. It makes me chuckle when I hear people complaining about their smartphones when they should be jumping up and… Read More
Since its formation just last year, SiFive has been riding the RISC-V rocket from purely academic interest to first commercialization. In an exclusive discussion, I talked with CEO Stefan Dyckerhoff and VP of Product and Business Development Jack Kang about their progress so far and what may be coming next.
Previously, I covered… Read More
Power is Everything
During Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank in the service module exploded forcing the crew to use the lunar module as a life boat to get back home, John Aaron – an incredibly gifted NASA engineer who was tasked with getting the Apollo 13 crew back home safely – flatly stated “Power is everything…we’ve… Read More
When we talk about open source, free usually comes in the context of “freedom”, not as in “free beer”, and open IP often serves as a base layer of value add for commercialization. The creators of the RISC-V instruction set, now working at startup SiFive, have released specifications for their aptly-named Freedom processor IP cores… Read More
