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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
Handsets moved away from fixed architecture DSP some time ago, driven by two main factors. Fixed architecture DSP consumed too much power to get good battery life in the smart-phone era, but the consumer air interface was changing fast: W-CDMA, HSPA, WiMax, 3G, LTE (which is actually a whole ‘spectrum’ of different… Read More
The history of TSMC and its Open Innovation Platform (OIP) is, like almost everything in semiconductors, driven by the economics of semiconductor manufacturing. Of course ICs started 50 years ago at Fairchild (very close to where Google is headquartered today, these things go in circles). The planarization approach, whereby… Read More
Your cell-phone contains a camera. In fact, it probably contains two: one forward facing for video-calls and one rear-facing for taking photographs and videos. The rear-facing one typically has much higher pixel count than the front-facing. The capabilities of cell-phone cameras are getting “good enough” that… Read More
