In the embedded world that drives much of today’s ASIC innovation, there is no bigger name than ARM. Not to enter the ARM vs. Intel fray, but it’s no exaggeration to say that ARM’s impact on SoCs is as great as Intel’s on the PC. Few cutting edge SoCs are coming to market that do not include some sort of embedded… Read More
One of the truisms of today’s disaggregated semiconductor design and manufacturing model is counter-intuitive to the do-it-yourself focus that is at the heart of every engineer. And yet, time and time again, success rewards those who understand that with today’s ever increasing complexity, it is difficult, if… Read More
Remember the processor-memory gap— a situation where the processor is forced to stall while waiting for a memory operation to complete? This was largely a result of the high latency required for off chip memory accesses. Haven’t we solved that problem now with SoCs? SoCs are typically architected with their processors … Read More
What’s new at Cadence? Quite a bit actually. I have always been a Cadence fan, I mean really, they gave birth to modern EDA. Unfortunately, Cadence really lost me during the Avant! legal action, the Mike Fister years, and EDA360. Recently, however, Cadence has made some big changes that will definitely get them back on my good side.… Read More
There’s this EDA company. They have over 100 tapeouts. They have a $28M in funding. They have 250 people. And you’ve never heard of them. Or at least I hadn’t.
They are ICScape. They started in 2005 with an investment from Acorn Campus Ventures and delivered their first product, ClockExplorer, in 2007 and their… Read More
Extrapolating the trends from last 20 years to the next ten suggests that we will be implementing a trillion transistors or more by 2020. At 20nm, with the chip sizes touching billions of transistors, the age old problem of how to implement a design in the most efficient manner remains unanswered. … Read More
Designing larger than ever SoC, integrating multiple ARM’s Cortex-A15 and Cortex-A9 microprocessor cores as well as complexes IP functions like HDMI controller, DDR3 Memory controller, Ethernet, SATA or PCI Express controller are pushing designers to search for better price, performance and area tradeoffs and the SoC interconnect… Read More
SemiWiki would like to call you, your co-workers, and your company to participate at ERSA Conference in Las Vegas , July 16-19, 2012. I will be there and it would be a pleasure to work with you on this very important event!
ERSA, is Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms. Since this year, the emphasis will be on the commercial… Read More
Once again with Synopsys and Arteris, the innovation is coming to solve an issue, faced by their potential customers: “In our research, we’ve found that almost half of project delays are caused by problems with the system architecture design and specification,” said Chris Rommel, vice president, embedded… Read More
The need for Network-on-Chip (NoC) has appeared at the time where chip makers realized that they could really integrate a complete system on a single die to build a System-on-Chip (SoC). I was in charge of the development of a large IC, integrating different type of functions (Analog and Digital) to support advanced TV application.… Read More
