One of the biggest challenges in the IP business, or any other business for that matter, is managing the information flow. Semiconductor IP is a critical piece of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem so anybody and everybody can write about it. Unfortunately, anybody and everybody ARE writing about it. From day one IP has been a … Read More
Semiconductor IP is definitely driving the rapid mobile expansion we are experiencing today and CEVA is a glaring example of that. Mobile design cycles are a fraction of what they used to be so who has time to create, integrate, AND validate your own IP blocks, especially at multiple foundries?
Just a little background, CEVA is really… Read More
Given that the majority of my 30+ years in Silicon Valley has revolved around semiconductor IP it should be of no surprise that IP is a big part of SemiWiki and our first book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”. That is also why one of my first round blogger draft choices was IP expert Dr. Eric Esteve. Eric has… Read More
Designing an SoC sounds way more exciting than bug tracking, but let’s face it – any bug has the potential to make your silicon fail, so we need to take a serious look at the approaches to bug tracking. When using an IP or an IP subsystem in a design, the SoC integrators require some critical knowledge about this IP. The actual… Read More
At DACin San Francisco this past June I was able to visit and blog about two dozen EDA companies, however there were so many more products and events to see that I couldn’t possibly have enough time to enjoy them all. Fortunately for me there were plenty of videos made of vendor presentations, so this week I got caught up a bit by… Read More
The perfect quarterly results are to slightly beat the consensus for earnings and profit, and not say anything negative about guidance for the upcoming quarter. Synopsys delivered all that with their latest quarter yesterday. Revenue was $521M versus $483M last year, giving solid growth of over 8%. Non-GAAP earnings per share… Read More
Royalty is a critical component in any IP deal. SoC companies want IP companies to share the risk of success (or failure) of their SoC and to enable that they want IP vendors to accept a substantial part of their payment to be paid as royalty. But the customers are also not very interested to shell out huge money to IP companies if the SoC… Read More
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
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
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:
