Andes Plays an ACE

Andes Plays an ACE
by Paul McLellan on 07-16-2014 at 9:01 am

There is a perception that ARM is the only microprocessor game in town due to their strong position in many markets, especially mobile. In areas where the instruction set shows through, then this is probably true. There is no rush to build smartphones where the application processor is something else. But even in a phone there are… Read More


EDA Mergers & Acquisitions Wiki Now Includes IP

EDA Mergers & Acquisitions Wiki Now Includes IP
by Ian Getreu on 07-10-2014 at 4:00 pm

When I started collecting my list of EDA mergers and acquisitions about 30 years ago, my objective was simply to determine the number of logos each EDA company owns. For that reason, I collected all the fish-eat-fish-eat-fish…. mergers and acquisitions, going way back to the very early days of EDA (even before it was called EDA).… Read More


ARC EM DSP supports Always-on Devices

ARC EM DSP supports Always-on Devices
by Eric Esteve on 06-22-2014 at 3:01 am

The ARC EM family is the low-power, embedded and low footprint processor part of the larger ARC processor. To target the ultra low-power markets like wearable and IoT, Synopsys has added DSP capabilities to EM5D and EM7D. To be specific, these cores are optimized for ultra low-power control and DSP, thanks to:

  • Energy-efficient
Read More

Kurt Shuler: Arteris Presentation at EDPS 2014

Kurt Shuler: Arteris Presentation at EDPS 2014
by Daniel Nenni on 04-30-2014 at 9:00 am

The Electronic Design Process Symposium is an annual workshop run by the IEEE Computer Society of Silicon Valley and the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation. I presented there because it’s devoid of product marketing pitches, and is two days of discussion on technical and process issues in SoC design. My slides are here:… Read More


Webinar: Making Design Reuse Work

Webinar: Making Design Reuse Work
by Daniel Nenni on 04-26-2014 at 9:00 pm

Please join me for an IP conversation in collaboration with ClioSoft on Wednesday, April 30th, 2014 @ 11:00 AM PST. At the EDPS Workshop IP day there were two interesting presentations on IP reuse. The first one was by Warren Savage of IPextreme: Top Ten Reasons Why Internal IP Reuse Fails. The second was by Ranjit Adhikary of ClioSoft:… Read More


Shorten Time to Market for NVM Express Based Storage Solution

Shorten Time to Market for NVM Express Based Storage Solution
by Daniel Nenni on 04-24-2014 at 11:00 am

A number of technical and business trends are converging to create a booming market for solid state drives (SSDs), with gigabytes of flash memory capacity along with the related control electronics packaged in the form factor of a 1.8”‐, 2.5”‐ or 3.5”. storage device. The first is the emergence of tablets and pervasiveness of smart… Read More


ARM Results, Strong Biceps

ARM Results, Strong Biceps
by Paul McLellan on 04-23-2014 at 10:53 am

ARM announced their Q1 results yesterday. Having just written that Intel lost $1B in mobile, I guess I could have used the title “ARM didn’t lose $1B in mobile.” They made $100M (on revenues of $300M). So let’s start off with what their results actually were and then look at what other things of interest … Read More


IP the eSilicon Way

IP the eSilicon Way
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2014 at 9:51 pm

Pop quiz: eSilicon has a big IP development group in what Asian country? If you didn’t know and you guessed, you probably got it wrong with China or India. It is Vietnam. In fact they have two sites. One in Ho Chi Minh City (that used to be called Saigon) and one in Da Nang.

At Electronic Design Process Symposium (EDPS) held last … Read More


On-chip Firewall

On-chip Firewall
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2014 at 8:00 am

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


Sonics Performance Monitor and Hardware Trace

Sonics Performance Monitor and Hardware Trace
by Paul McLellan on 04-07-2014 at 7:29 pm

As SoCs have got more complex, and with a larger and larger software content, it is no longer good enough to just monitor how the design behaves using simulation and then completely forget about it once the design is complete. What is required is the capability to monitor the design in real time (in silicon or FPGA) to see how it is behaving.… Read More