TSMC on Collaboration: JIT Ecosystem Development

TSMC on Collaboration: JIT Ecosystem Development
by Paul McLellan on 03-27-2013 at 2:02 pm

Cliff Hou of TSMC gave the keynote today at SNUG on Collaborate to Innovate: a Foundry’s Perspective. Starting around 45nm the way that a foundry has to work with its ecosystem fundamentally changed. Up until then, each process generation was similar enough to the previous one, apart obviously from size, that it could be … Read More


Cadence IP Report Card 2013

Cadence IP Report Card 2013
by Daniel Nenni on 03-17-2013 at 7:00 pm

The challenges of developing IP blocks, integrating them correctly, and hitting the power, performance, area, and time to market requirements of a mobile SoC is a growing problem. At 20nm and 14nm the probability of a chip re-spin due to an error is approaching 50% and we all know how disastrous a re-spin can be, those are not good … Read More


Who Allegedly Broke Tela’s Patents: Is Samsung or Qualcomm the Real Villain?

Who Allegedly Broke Tela’s Patents: Is Samsung or Qualcomm the Real Villain?
by Randy Smith on 02-25-2013 at 1:08 pm

I recently blogged about the actions filed by Tela Innovations at both the US International Trade Commission (USITC) and in federal district court. Those actions allege that five mobile phone manufacturers -HTC, LG, Motorola Mobility, Pantech, and Nokia – were importing handsets into the US which infringed on seven of… Read More


TSMC ♥ Oasys

TSMC ♥ Oasys
by Paul McLellan on 01-31-2013 at 8:05 pm

Oasys has joined the TSMC Soft-IP Alliance Program. This means that TSMC IP partners have access to a new RTL exploration tool to improve QoR and reduce the iterations needed for design closure. In modern process nodes, RTL engineers implementing complex IP cores for graphics, networking, and mobile computing are struggling … Read More


A Brief History of Sidense

A Brief History of Sidense
by Daniel Nenni on 01-24-2013 at 9:00 pm


Sidense Corp. is a leading developer of embedded non-volatile memory (NVM) intellectual property (IP) for the semiconductor IC market. The company is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, and has a global presence with sales offices worldwide.

The company was founded in 2004 by CTO Wlodek Kurjanowicz, a MoSys fellow and co-founder… Read More


New HP Memristor Material Developments

New HP Memristor Material Developments
by Ed McKernan on 12-12-2012 at 10:00 pm

At the recent NCCAVS Thin Film Users Group meeting in November, HP was on the program in the person of Joshua Yang who gave a materials centric look at the status of the HP ReRAM (Memristor) program. A colleague passed on the informative set of slides presented at the meeting. Being a former process integration team leader, I was immediately… Read More


A Brief History of the MIPS Architecture

A Brief History of the MIPS Architecture
by IMGJen on 12-07-2012 at 1:00 pm

MIPS is one of the most prolific, longest-living industry-standard processor architectures, existing in numerous incarnations over nearly three decades.

MIPS has powered products including game systems from Nintendo and Sony; DVRs from Dish Network, EchoStar and TiVo; set-top boxes from Cisco and Motorola; DTVs from Samsung… Read More


The Protocol Processing Dataplane

The Protocol Processing Dataplane
by Paul McLellan on 10-11-2012 at 8:48 pm

At the Linley processor conference this week, Chris Rowen, the CTO of Tensilica presented on the protocol processing dataplane. That sounds superficially like he is talking about networking but in fact true protocol processing is just part of adding powerful compute features to the dataplane. Other applications are video, … Read More


Tensilica Ships 2 Billionth Core

Tensilica Ships 2 Billionth Core
by Paul McLellan on 10-10-2012 at 7:00 am

It was in June of last year that Tensilica announced that they (or rather their licensees) had shipped one billion cores. Now they have just announced that they have shipped two billion cores. They are shipping at a run-rate of 800 million cores per year, which is 50% higher than June last year. If business continues to grow they will… Read More


Re-defining Semiconductor Collaboration!

Re-defining Semiconductor Collaboration!
by Daniel Nenni on 07-22-2012 at 7:00 pm

GlobalFoundries did a nice response to my “How has 20nm Changed the Semiconductor Ecosystem?” and redefined the word collaboration. Our industry is plagued with sound bites and acronyms so let us agree on a semiconductor ecosystem definition of collaboration.

Mojy Chianis senior vice president, design enablement at… Read More