Timing closure is the perennial issue in digital IC design. While the specific problem that has needed to be solved to achieve timing closure over the decades has continuously changed, it has always been a looming problem. And the timing closure problem has gotten more severe with 16/14nm FinFET SoCs due to greater distances between… Read More
Tag: soc
Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing Gets Boost from Mentor TSMC Collaboration
I caught up with John Ferguson of Mentor Graphics this week to learn more about a recent announcement that TSMC has extended its collaboration with Mentor in the area of Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing (FOWLP).
In March of last year Mentor and TSMC announced that they were collaborating on a design and verification flow for TSMC’s… Read More
The Year of the eFPGA
The start of the new year is typically a time for annual predictions. Prognostications are especially difficult in our industry, due to the increasing difficulty in Moore’s Law technology scaling and greater design complexity challenges. There is one sure prediction, however — this year will see the emergence … Read More
Netspeed Gemini NoC Provides Coherent Fabric in Mobileye’s Next-generation EyeQ5 SoC
Last week I wrote about NetSpeed’s network on chip (NoC) IP technology and design environment NocStudio. This week we see a real life application of this technology announced at CES by Imagination Technologies and NetSpeed. The companies have announced that Mobileye will use Imagination and NetSpeed IP in their next-generation… Read More
NetSpeed Bridges the Gap Between Architecture and Implementation
This is part II of an article covering NetSpeed’s network-on-chip (NoC) offerings. This article dives a little deeper into what a NoC is and how NetSpeed’s network synthesis tool, NocStudio, helps system architects optimize a NoC for their system-on-a-chip (SoC) design.
Traditionally IC designers have used proprietary buses,… Read More
Intel Spreadtrum ARM SoCs
In June of 2013 Edward Snowden copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA). His actions exposed numerous surveillance programs that many governments around the world reacted to, including China. In September of 2013 China Vice Premier Ma Kai declared semiconductors a key sector for the … Read More
NetSpeed Leverages Machine Learning for Automotive IC End-to-End QoS Solutions
A couple of weeks back I wrote an article about the use of machine learning and deep neural networks in self-driving cars. Now I find that machine learning is also being applied to help build advanced end-to-end QoS (quality of service) solutions for the automotive IC market. With the advent of self-driving cars comes requirements… Read More
Performance Analysis for ARM Based SOC’s
ARM estimates that many SOC’s designed today have over 200 IP components. This statistic comes from a recent white paper ARM published addressing the topic of system performance analysis. This number is only going to go up. According the ARM this creates a huge challenge in ensuring the system is designed with adequate performance… Read More
Bringing the Semiconductor IP Community Together!
Next week is the first REUSE Semiconductor IP Tradeshow and Conference at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. The presentation abstracts are up now and there are a few I want to highlight as they are companies that we work with on SemiWiki.… Read More
Is That PDK Safe to Use Yet?
In our semiconductor ecosystem we have foundries on one side supplying all of that amazing silicon technology, and IC designers on the other side that take their system ideas then go implement them in a SoC using a specific foundry. The required interface between foundry and chip designers has been the Process Design Kit (PDK), … Read More