Webinar on IP Lifecycle Management

Webinar on IP Lifecycle Management
by Daniel Payne on 10-23-2013 at 5:44 pm

EDA and Semiconductor companies are offering new webinars almost every week of the year, so there’s always something worth learning about that only takes an hour of time. On November 5th there’s an interesting webinar planned on the topic of IP Lifecycle Management, hosted by Methodics. I blogged two weeks ago about,… Read More


New at DAC: IP, Automotive, Security

New at DAC: IP, Automotive, Security
by Paul McLellan on 10-18-2013 at 12:09 pm

The deadline for panel sessions, workshops, tutorials and co-located conferences for DAC 2014 is October 21st. That’s next Monday!

DAC 2014 will not only focus on EDA and embedded systems and software but
also include:

  • design methods for automotive systems and software
  • hardware and embedded systems security
  • IP (semiconductor
Read More

CEVA-XC Wireless Baseband Core

CEVA-XC Wireless Baseband Core
by Paul McLellan on 10-17-2013 at 5:51 pm

Eyal Bergman of CEVA announced their latest core yesterday at the Linley Microprocessor Conference. It’s their 4th generation CEVA-XC solution, which is the core of their offering for wireless baseband. It builds on 3 previous generations of CEVA-XC’s that were mainly targeted toward handset applications. This… Read More


Putting the Ten in Tensilica

Putting the Ten in Tensilica
by Paul McLellan on 10-17-2013 at 3:55 pm

Chris Rowen of Cadence’s Tensilica announced the tenth generation of the Xtensa customizable processor at the Linley Microprocessor Conference yesterday. Chris was one of the founders of Tensilica…back in 1997. I believe that the first version was released in 1999. Over the years the Tensilica business changed.… Read More


Andes: the Biggest Microprocessor IP Company You’ve Never Hear Of

Andes: the Biggest Microprocessor IP Company You’ve Never Hear Of
by Paul McLellan on 10-16-2013 at 3:06 pm

I wrote in April about Andes Technology, a microprocessor IP licensing company that even the person sitting next to me, a strategic marketing guy from Qualcomm had never heard of. So, OK, if you read that earlier article you had at least heard of them.

Part of the reason you haven’t heard of them is that they are in Taiwan (in Hsinchu)… Read More


Enter the Warrior

Enter the Warrior
by Paul McLellan on 10-14-2013 at 11:57 am

Since Imagination’s acquisition of MIPS at the end of last year, the MIPS product line has been given a new lease of life. There are two things driving this. The first is simply that with its new home, the MIPS architecture has a solid future whereas before it was uncertain. Secondly, Imagination moved their own general purpose… Read More


A Big Thank You to EDA and IP

A Big Thank You to EDA and IP
by Daniel Nenni on 10-05-2013 at 10:00 pm

Electronic Design Automation Software and Semiconductor Intellectual Property are not so much the tail that wags the dog, rather they are like the heart of an elephant, tiny in comparison but without which there is no elephant. There is no doubt that EDA and IP have been key enablers of the semiconductor industry for the past 50 years… Read More


Using OTP Memories To Keep SoC Power Down

Using OTP Memories To Keep SoC Power Down
by Paul McLellan on 09-20-2013 at 1:43 pm

Virtually all SoCs require one-time programmable (OTP) memory. Each SoC is different, of course, but two main uses are large memories for holding boot and programming code and small memories for holding encryption keys and trimming parameters, such as radio tuning information and so on.

There are alternatives to putting an OTP… Read More


A Brief History of TSMC’s OIP part 2

A Brief History of TSMC’s OIP part 2
by Paul McLellan on 09-18-2013 at 11:00 pm

The existence of TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) program further sped up disaggregation of the semiconductor supply chain. Partly, this was enabled by the existence of a healthy EDA industry and an increasingly healthy IP industry. As chip designs had grown more complex and entered the system-on-chip (SoC) era, the amount… Read More


TSMC’s 16FinFET and 3D IC Reference Flows

TSMC’s 16FinFET and 3D IC Reference Flows
by Paul McLellan on 09-17-2013 at 2:01 am

Today TSMC announced three reference flows that they have been working on along with various EDA vendors (and ARM and perhaps other IP suppliers). The three new flows are:

  • 16FinFET Digital Reference Flow. Obviously this has full support for non-planar FinFET transistors including extraction, quantized pitch placement, low-vdd
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