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 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
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
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
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
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
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
ARC is a family of configurable processors. Originally it was a standalone company in the UK (what is it with the UK and processor cores?) spun out from Argonaut Software. The A in ARC stood for Argonaut originally. ARC International was acquired by Virage and then Virage was acquired by Synopsys so now it is part of Synopsys Designware… Read More
As I have mentioned before, Paul McLellan and I are writing a book on the history of the fabless semiconductor industry. There is a preview available HERE, it will initially be sold as an e-book on SemiWiki and put into print early next year. Working with Paul McLellan and Beth Martin on this was an amazing experience. The research,… Read More
SoC’s are now dominated by IP blocks sourced either from 3rd parties or internal design teams. This means that IP is now critical to the success of the SoC, yet it is part of the design that teams have the least control over, or visibility into. Most design teams utilize at best ad-hoc methods to manage this IP, and the few that utilize… Read More
