Hierarchical Clock Domain Crossing

Hierarchical Clock Domain Crossing
by Paul McLellan on 10-23-2013 at 1:31 pm

One of the first blogs I wrote on SemiWiki was on clock domain crossing (CDC). I thought it was rather a specialized subject, a sort of minority interest. It turned out to be one of the most-read blogs I’ve written. Modern SoCs have lots of unrelated clocks, maybe hundreds, and so ensuring that signals going from one clock domain… Read More


ARM Signs 48 New Licenses in Q3

ARM Signs 48 New Licenses in Q3
by Paul McLellan on 10-22-2013 at 3:15 pm

ARM announced their quarterly results early this morning. ARM’s results are a funny mixture of backward looking information such as royalties which are reported a quarter late since they have to wait for their licensees to work out how many they shipped, and some very forward looking such as new licenses, which bring some… Read More


The Biggest Private EDA Company

The Biggest Private EDA Company
by admin on 10-21-2013 at 5:02 pm

I talked this morning with fellow Brit David Halliday. More importantly, he is CEO of Silvaco, which he thinks must be the biggest private EDA company in the world. He didn’t reveal their revenue numbers but they have around 250-300 people and are profitable so you can make your own estimate.

David became CEO when Ivan Pesic,… Read More


GSA Memory+ Conference in Taiwan

GSA Memory+ Conference in Taiwan
by Paul McLellan on 10-18-2013 at 3:02 pm

The GSA Memory+ conference Taiwan will take place on (Halloween!) October 31, 2013 at the Regent Taipei, Taiwan. The main theme of this year is highlighting Memory—the Critical Enabler for Prominent and Emerging Applications in System Logic Solutions.

GSA Memory+ Conference is the global industry event dedicated to all memory… 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


How Asia Works, phase 2/3

How Asia Works, phase 2/3
by Paul McLellan on 10-17-2013 at 2:19 am

Success in manufacturing has two conditions: tariff barriers to shield the infant industries from external competition, and a rigorous focus on exports to ensure that manufacturing cannot just shelter behind the tariff barriers and reap monopoly profits inside the country. Each industry needs to have several companies enter,… Read More


Using HLS to Turbocharge Verification

Using HLS to Turbocharge Verification
by Paul McLellan on 10-16-2013 at 8:23 am

One of the benefits of using high-level synthesis is obviously the ease of writing some algorithms in SystemC since it is at a higher level than RTL (that’s why we call it high-level synthesis!). But a second benefit is at the verification level. Since a lot of the verification gets done at the SystemC level, less needs to be done at … Read More


Always-on Context-aware Sensors in Your Phone

Always-on Context-aware Sensors in Your Phone
by Paul McLellan on 10-16-2013 at 8:00 am

Smartphones are smart but they are about to get smarter. The next big thing in mobile phones is to have a rich sensor environment: proximity, temperature and humidity, atmospheric pressure, light color, cover, gyroscope, magnetometer, accelerometer, ambient light, gesture and more. Some of these are already here, of course,… Read More