The biggest market for semiconductors is mobile and an ARM processor is the center of the axle around which it revolves. So everyone in the mobile ecosystem needs to work closely with ARM. At CDNLive earlier this week Cadence and ARM announced that they are deepening their partnership. Most of what they announced makes it a lot easier… Read More
Wearables are clearly one of the hot areas of the Internet of Things (IoT). A big part of that market is sensors of one sort or another. Andes low power microprocessors are a good fit for this market which requires both 32 bit performance and ultra low power. Performance is needed since IoT by definition has internet access in some way… Read More
I wrote recently about the EDAC mixer in Mountain View. Due to college basketball there won’t be one in March, the next one will be in April. Details later in the month.
The EDA Consortium (EDAC) is seeking nominations for the Board of Directors for the two-year term beginning May 29, 2014. Voting member companies are entitled… Read More
At DVCon today I talked to Sanjiv Kaul, the CEO of Calypto. Just as a reminder, Calypto have 3 products, SLEC (sequential logical equivalence checking, also called sequential formal verification), PowerPro (sequential RTL level power reduction) and Catapult High Level Synthesis (that they took over from Mentor in 2011 in a complicated… Read More
I started using internal EDA tools at Intel beginning in 1978 and have worked in the commercial EDA industry since 1986, so it was a delight to read a chapter about EDA in Nenni and McLellan’s newest book: Fabless – The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry. Starting in the 1970’s the authors talk about… Read More
Integration is often an underrated attribute of good tools, compared to raw performance and technology. But these days integration is differentiation (try telling that to your calculus teacher). Today at DVCon Synopsys announced Verification Compiler which integrates pretty much all of Synopsys’s verification technologies… Read More
Actually these days even Baskin-Robbins has more, but not 505. But as it says in the title, Atmel have 505 different microcontrollers. That’s a lot. Some are AVR, both 8 bit and 32 bit, and some are various flavors of ARM (all 32 bit) ranging from older parts like the ARM9 to various flavors of Cortex ranging from the M0 (tiny microcontroller… Read More
Back in the 1990s in the middle of the 2G GSM era, cell-phone manufacturers would display a “triangle of difficulty” with a large base labeled radio, a middle smaller part labeled baseband and a little triangle on top labelled software. The idea was that the radio was incredibly difficult, then the baseband chip and… Read More
GlobalFoundries was created by spinning out the manufacturing side of AMD’s semiconductor business. Initially the company was jointly owned by AMD and by the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) which is an investment arm of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. A couple of years ago ATIC bought out the remaining share from… Read More
Yesterday evening was EDAC’s first mixer. I assume the first of a regular event. It was held in Mountain View in the old train station which is now the Savvy Cellar wine bar. I had a nice glass of rosé from Provence that reminded me of the years that I lived in the south of France. Some of the money we spent went to charity, to the Mountain… Read More
