Imagination’s New GPU Cores

Imagination’s New GPU Cores
by Paul McLellan on 01-06-2014 at 9:00 am

This morning Imagination announced their latest GPU cores, including the world’s smallest fully-featured OpenGL ES3.0/OpenCL GPU core. More on that below. And it is the Internet…and graphics…so cats. Graphically rendered cats.

The first core is a a high end core new generation PowerVR Series6XT architecture… Read More


SemiWiki 2013 in Review!

SemiWiki 2013 in Review!
by Daniel Nenni on 01-01-2014 at 9:30 am

This certainly was an interesting year. The fabless semiconductor ecosystem definitely got stronger and I see nothing but clear skies in 2014. Judging by the SemiWiki 2013 analytics and key search terms we all have an interesting year ahead of us with even more opportunities to grow and innovate. 2013 was also a year of growth and… Read More


Why CEVA Is My Favorite Semiconductor IP Stock For 2014

Why CEVA Is My Favorite Semiconductor IP Stock For 2014
by Ashraf Eassa on 12-10-2013 at 9:05 pm

As a full time financial writer/investor, I am always on the lookout for compelling risk/reward opportunities, particularly in small-cap tech. While the world of large-cap tech is generally well understood by the investment/analyst community, smaller cap names are usually under-followed and often misunderstood. One such… Read More


A Brief History of DSP…Not By Any of Us

A Brief History of DSP…Not By Any of Us
by Paul McLellan on 12-04-2013 at 11:35 am

I came across an interesting article by Will Strauss which is pretty much the history of DSP in communication chips. Having lived through the early part of the history while I was at VLSI Technology I found it especially interesting.

At VSLI, our first GSM (2G, i.e. digital not analog air interface) was a 5-chip chipset. The DSP functionality… Read More


eMMC Mobile Memory

eMMC Mobile Memory
by Paul McLellan on 11-27-2013 at 11:40 am

eMMC is the standard for mobile memory used in smartphones and tablets. The latest standard, released just this year, is eMMC 5.0. The previous standard, 4.51, was only released last year so things are moving quickly.

Arasan have a webinar next week to bring you up to speed on eMMC 5.0 in general and, of course, their own IP offering… Read More


5 Rules of Power Management Using NoCs

5 Rules of Power Management Using NoCs
by Paul McLellan on 11-18-2013 at 4:30 pm

If it has escaped your notice that power management on SoCs is important then you need to get out more. Increasingly, the complexity of the interconnect between the various processors, memories, offload processors, devices, interfaces and other blocks means that the best way to implement it is to use a network on chip (NoC). But… Read More


Design Methodology and its Impact on the Future of Electronics

Design Methodology and its Impact on the Future of Electronics
by Paul McLellan on 11-18-2013 at 3:20 pm

Today at the Semisrael Expo 2013 (in Israel of course) Ajoy Bose gave a keynote on how design methodology will impact electronics. The big pictures is that microelectronics is driven by some major disruptive forces and, as a result, technology and industry are evolving dramatically, which creates a need for research and innovation… Read More


Raptor Image Signal Processor

Raptor Image Signal Processor
by Paul McLellan on 11-18-2013 at 9:00 am

This fall there seems to be a bumper harvest of cores. Today Imagination Technologies announced their latest core for image signal processing. Like all of their cores, it is designed to be part of an SoC and is designed to work with other Imagination cores to build a complete image processing system. In particular, it is designed … Read More


The Pelican Has Landed: Formal on an Unannounced ARM Processor

The Pelican Has Landed: Formal on an Unannounced ARM Processor
by Paul McLellan on 11-10-2013 at 3:00 pm

At the Jasper Users’ Group, Alex Netterville of ARM presented about how ARM are using formal on an unannounced processor code-named Pelican. Don’t read the presentation trying to find out information about Pelican itself, there isn’t any. That wasn’t the topic. Alex has been using formal approaches… Read More


TSMC on Semiconductor IP Quality

TSMC on Semiconductor IP Quality
by Daniel Nenni on 11-07-2013 at 9:00 am

It is important to note that the System On Chip (SoC) revolution that is currently driving mobile electronics has one very important enabling technology and that is Semiconductor Intellectual Property. Where would we be without the commercial IP market segment? Computers and phones would still be on our desks for one thing, and… Read More