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Simon Segars to be New CEO of ARM

Simon Segars to be New CEO of ARM
by Paul McLellan on 03-20-2013 at 4:15 pm

ARM announced today that Warren East, the CEO, would be retiring at the end of June. The new CEO will be Simon Segars, currently President of ARM and the de facto #2 guy. Currently Simon is based in the US and I don’t know if he plans to return to Britain or not. But he will live what will inevitably be a lifestyle that involves crossing the Atlantic a lot, no matter which side he picks.

It is interesting that ARM will have a new CEO this year since their big rival in the microprocessor business, Intel, will also have one. Intel announced that Otellini will be stepping down in May, but they have a search going on for the successor.

I installed the design tools used to design the first ARM processor, inside Acorn Computer. I was there when ARM was spun out of Acorn since VLSI Technology provided all the design tools ARM would need for an equity stake. I know many people who do or have worked there. At VLSI for a year or two I was responsible for our relationship with ARM and for renegotiating our licenses. So I inevitably follow ARM a bit more closely than any other company. It is clear that Simon is a “safe pair of hands”. ARM is in great shape right now so this is not a CEO change where a major course correction is expected (at least not by me). During Warren’s tenure as CEO, ARM’s partners shipped 40 billion ARM microprocessors. But ARM ships around 8B per year now, so that number will not take long to be exceeded on Simon’s watch.


View from the top: Brad Quinton

View from the top: Brad Quinton
by Daniel Payne on 03-20-2013 at 3:53 pm

Many engineers dream about starting their own company some day, and today I talked with an engineer that has gone beyond the dreaming stage to actually start an EDA company and then get that company acquired. His name is Brad Quinton and the start-up was called Veridae Systems, now part of Tektronix.


Brad Quinton
Continue reading “View from the top: Brad Quinton”


Interconnect Optimization of an SoC Architecture

Interconnect Optimization of an SoC Architecture
by Daniel Payne on 03-20-2013 at 11:41 am

My last chip design at Intel was a GPU called the 82786and the architects of the chip wrote a virtual prototype using the MAINSAIL language. By using a virtual prototype they were able to:


Wally Rhines, Victor Peng and Chenming Hu to Speak at Mentor User2User Conference

Wally Rhines, Victor Peng and Chenming Hu to Speak at Mentor User2User Conference
by glforte on 03-20-2013 at 10:29 am

This year’s Mentor Graphics user group meeting, User2User, will be held at the DoubleTree by Hilton in San Jose, California on April 25, 2013. The featured keynote presenters include…

  • Dr. Walden C. Rhines, CEO and Chairman of Mentor Graphics, talking about “Organizing by Design”
  • Victor Peng, Senior VP, Xilinx presenting on “The Era of Heterogeneous Architectures and Integration Technologies”
  • Dr. Chenming Hu, creator of the 3D transistor, presenting “FinFET is a Beginning,” showing how FinFET overcomes the impending show stopper limits that device physics imposes

The event will share best practices through customer success stories and technical presentations. Sessions will discuss Calibre, Custom IC/AMS, Emulation, Functional Verification, PBC Flow, Place and Route and Silicon Test. Mentor Graphics customers can register at http://user2user.mentor.com/san-jose-registration-2013.html

See conference agenda:


Speech Recognition : Can it be the next game changer?

Speech Recognition : Can it be the next game changer?
by gauravjalan on 03-19-2013 at 8:10 pm

The cell phone phenomena has catalyzed the technology growth and coaxed the hardware and software to work more closely. The Apple effect further directed this technology growth to focus on enhanced user experience. The emphasis has been primarily on the display and touch aspects of the designs with limited adoption on other areas. The handsets have moved from buttons to touch display and the next wave under discussion is gesture recognition. Interestingly, direct human to human interaction is mainly through speech while human to machine interface still relies more on passive modes. As a first step to enable this, there is a need for the hardware to respond to the voice commands (pre-defined to start with). A ‘Speech Recognition’ hardware unit is required to interpret the human speech and translate it into text or commands. The applications include call routing for customer service calls, controlling consumer appliances or in-car systems, preparing transcripts and content navigation on cell phone.

Gartner’s annual Hype Cycle Special Report on technologies and trends from cross industry perspective in 2011 revealed that it will take 2 to 5 years for mainstream adoption on this technology.

The main challenges preventing it from moving ahead include –

Developing a programmable user interface – There are a variety of languages across the globe and even for a single language the pronunciation varies widely. The solution should be able to overcome this hurdle with an easy to use interface.

Power – Speech Recognition is a computationally intensive technology requiring several million operations per second. Power dissipation is the key and limits the usage of SW based solutions especially in battery powered devices where continuous use of speech recognition or “Always Listening” as it is popularly known can drain the battery in no time.

While multiple groups might be working towards a solution, one from India claims to have a sophisticated solution available with them. 3iLogic-Designs, founded by seasoned professionals in 2011 recently uploaded multiple videos of their prototype solution. The product name is SimSim and is supposed to be the world’s first ultra compact language & speaker independent, zero connectivity, synthesizable speech recognition core with configurable vocabulary and grammar support. A high level block diagram of the SimSim architecture is given below –

The salient features include –

  • Highly accurate speaker independent Speech Recognition
  • Scalable vocabulary
  • Java Speech Grammar (JSGF) support
  • Based on proven HMM technology
  • Language independent architecture
  • 16Khz/8Khz audio support
  • VAD (Voice activity detection) support with auto calibration for ambient noise
  • Processor-independent, stand-alone operation
  • Independent of external memory type (DDR2/3, SDRAM, SRAM etc.)
  • Very compact solution in terms of memory requirements
  • Implemented with 135K Gates

The list above makes SimSim an ideal solution for localized Vocal-UI solutions for Cell Phones, Digital Cameras, PNDs, MFPs, Watches, Remote Controls, Microwaves, Washing machines etc.

Such a technology enhances user experience for regions with tech savvy population and becomes a prime selling point for the next generation of devices. Along with that it can also drive technology adoption in developing geographies. Countries like India where a majority of consumer market is still untapped primarily because of diversity in the languages spoken and high ramp up learning time on technology, this solution can be a game changer!

The magic of “SimSim” from Arabian Nights is awaiting to open the doors of fortunes once again 🙂


Tablets & smart phones driving electronics growth

Tablets & smart phones driving electronics growth
by Bill Jewell on 03-19-2013 at 8:10 pm

Worldwide electronics bounced back strongly in 2010 after the recession of 2008-2009. Every region experienced solid growth, ranging from high single-digit growth in the U.S. to over 20% in the key Asian countries. However in the last two years electronics has slowed down significantly. Several factors contributed to this weakness: a sluggish recovery in the U.S., the European debt crisis, the Japan earthquake and tsunami, and slowing growth in China. Recent signs point to an improvement in electronics. The chart below shows government data on three-month-average electronics production versus a year ago for China, the U.S. and Japan. Total industrial production is shown for Europe and South Korea since electronics production statistics are not available. The black line shows three-month-average change versus a year ago for worldwide semiconductors, from WSTS.

China remains the key driver of electronics. December 2012 growth picked up to 12.7% after falling to 10% in August through October. South Korea’s industrial production growth was 3% in January 2013 after five months below 1%. U.S. electronics remains lethargic with January 2013 down 1.3%, the sixth consecutive month of year-to-year declines. Europe industrial production (for the 27 countries in the European Union) has shown year-to-year declines for 12 straight months. Japan electronics production recovered to positive year-to-year growth in April 2012, but has since fallen to a 16% decline in December 2012.

The recent moderate growth in overall electronics is reflected by three-month-average world semiconductor shipments from WSTS. December 2012 and January 2013 each showed 3.8% growth versus a year ago. Previously the WSTS data showed 16 months of year-to-year declines from July 2011 to October 2012.

What are the key drivers of this pickup in electronics? The PC has been a major factor in the electronics and semiconductors industries for 30 years. In the last two years PC units have been stagnant, based on reports from International Data Corporation (IDC). Over the same time period growth of media tablets has been explosive. Since the current wave of tablets began with Apple’s iPad in 2Q 2010 shipments have grown to 52.5 million units in 4Q 2012, according to IDC (as shown in the chart below). Tablet units in 4Q 2012 were equal to 58% of PC units. Tablets are obviously displacing some PC sales as well as creating a new market. Adding together the unit shipments of PCs and tablets reveals the healthy growth of the combined markets. The blue line shows the change versus a year ago for PCs plus tablets. The combined growth rate was over 20% in the second half of 2011, moderating to low double digits in the first half of 2012. Growth dropped to 1% in 3Q 2012 due to slow Apple iPad shipments as consumers waited for new models. Growth bounced back to 13% in 4Q 2012.

Mobile phones are another major driver of electronics and semiconductors. Overall mobile phone unit growth was weak in 2012, up only 1% from 2011 according to IDC. All the growth has been driven by smart phones, which grew 41% in 2012 as basic phones declined 15%. As shown in the chart below, smart phones accounted for 45% of total mobile phone units in 4Q 2012. Smart phones should account for the majority of mobile phone units in 2013. The high semiconductor content of smart phones compared to basic phones will drive higher semiconductor growth.

Continued growth in the electronics and semiconductor markets is dependent on improvement in the world economy. As shown in last month’s newsletter, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects improving economic growth in 2013 and 2014. (See “Semiconductors Down 2.7% in ’12, May Grow 7.5% in ’13” at http://www.semiconductorintelligence.com). Although PCs and total mobile phones are experiencing slower growth, media tablets and smart phones will be key elements in the electronics and semiconductor market recoveries.


A Brief History of Chips and Technologies

A Brief History of Chips and Technologies
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2013 at 4:26 pm

I talked to Dado Banatao today. He is managing partner at Tallwood Venture Capital today but back in the mid-1980s he was the founder of Chips and Technologies, the first fabless semiconductor company. The rumors that they had a hard time raising money because VCs couldn’t comprehend a fabless semiconductor company are true. Even his friends told him it “wasn’t a real semiconductor company.” In fact the first $1M was raised from a real-estate investor! Only once they were further along were they able to raise another $3M from various Japanese investors including Mitsui.

Dado decided to use gate-arrays to get to market fast since the PC market was developing fast and the opportunity to build chipsets to serve it was there and then. They went with Toshiba, who they reckoned had the best gate-array technology at the time. But the design was too large for even the biggest gate-array so they partitioned it into a logic CMOS gate-array and all the drivers on a separate bipolar chip that Hitachi fabbed. Hitachi had a completely empty fab due to the semiconductor downturn at the time. C&T filled it completely. Since Hitachi were desperate for something in that fab they got unbelievably low prices.

The business took off fast. By the time they had their IPO, they still had $1M of their original $4M investment in the bank. The fact that Mitsui was an investor turned out to be fortuitous, since it meant that they could just order from Toshiba and Hitachi, without having to pay up-front with working capital that they didn’t have. Mitsui financed $50M in inventory.

There was no really competitive product for 2 years until VLSI had its first chipset. The bipolar chip turned out to be an edge since at that time ESD protection on CMOS was in its infancy and was still at least a potential problem, which meant C&T could create FUD about reliability against VLSI’s all-CMOS solution. 3 years later C&T had a solution that was all-CMOS too, but by then ESD protection was up to 20KV and those issues had gone away.

C&T got into Dell very early and they rode that rocket together. But in the meantime Compaq was king but they didn’t believe in using chipsets at that point. But then Taiwan, Korea and Japan were suddenly all making PCs and Compaq couldn’t compete so they had to switch too. Interestingly, at that point in the industry history, C&T were making more on each PC that Intel was. C&T was eventually acquired by Intel in 1997.

Dado went on to found S3 (graphics processors) again using gate-arrays initially to get to market fast once they decided what the market needed. They looked around for who had the biggest arrays at the time and found one at Seiko-Epson that they decided to use. In order to get data moved around fast enough they developed their own interconnect that they called Advanced Chip Interconnect, which, when Intel basically adopted it became PCI and PCIe.


RealTime Register Retiming

RealTime Register Retiming
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2013 at 7:00 am

I was at the EDAC CEO forecast meeting last week and one of the questions that was asked of EDAC members was “which is the hottest EDA startup?” The one with the most nominations was Oasys. So Oasys is hot.

But register retiming is hotter.

The latest announcement from Oasys this morning is that register retiming is now available in the RealTime synthesis engine that underlies all of Oasys’s products. This is driven especially by Oasys’s customers designing high-performance graphics processors (GPUs) since these have very complex pipelines that are next to impossible to balance by hand in the RTL. However, it is also applicable to many other domains especially in communications.


Register retiming involves moving logic from before a register to after (or vice versa) in a way that preserves functionality, but improves timing, power and/or area. For a datapath, typically this is attempting to balance the amount of logic between all stages of a pipeline so that the entire pipeline can be clocked at the ideal frequency, rather than being limited due to especially long paths in some stages. This may involve adding (or removing) additional registers, as in the example above, to hold intermediate values from in the combinational logic.


In fact it makes the design easier since extra registers can be added almost trivially to the design, typically at the end of a datapath or just after a large cone of combinational logic, leaving the synthesis engine to pull the registers into the logic cones (and duplicate them if necessary) in order to balance the clocks, as in the example above.

Note that although the behavior at the inputs and outputs is identical, the sequential behavior will not be identical in that the number of registers and the register contents may differ. A trivial example is pushing an inverter from before a register to after it. The final output will be the same but the contents of the register will be inverted from before.


A tour of today’s Mixed-Signal solution

A tour of today’s Mixed-Signal solution
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-18-2013 at 10:00 pm


Mixed-Signal design is one of the very initial design methodologies, pioneered by Cadence with its lead in custom design; now taking centre space in the world of SoCs. Its growth is surmountable as it finds its place in most of the high growth electronics like smart phones, automotive applications, networks and communications, bio-medical engineering, safety and security applications, precise instrumentation etc. With the increase of design size having large analog content along with digital, shrinking technology node, power becoming critical and timing as ever overwhelming, the complexity of design and verification has increased tremendously.

There is an opportunity to learn about the latest mixed-signal methodologies and techniques from the experts in this domain from Cadence and how it provides the complete solution for the mixed-signal design. It’s a forum where one can build network with other technologists as well that can, at times, help meeting the challenges of this complex task.

It’s a complete one day session, here is the program:

[TABLE] style=”width: 100%”
|-
| style=”width: 12%” | Date:
| style=”width: 50%” | 02 Apr 2013 – 09 Apr 2013
|-
| Location:
| Ottawa, Ontario – April 2, 2013
Baltimore, MD – April 4, 2013
Chelmsford, MA – April 9, 2013
|-
|
| Register »
|-

Who should attend?

  • Circuit designers
  • AMS and SoC verification engineers
  • Analog/custom layout engineers
  • Digital P&R engineers
  • CAD engineers and managers
  • Design managers
  • Anyone involved with realizing mixed-signal designs in silicon

What is there to learn?

  • Techniques and tips to enhance your mixed-signal flow
  • Insight into the latest mixed-signal verification and implementation methodologies
  • Recommendations, based on silicon-proven successes, for effectively deploying new methodologies in your design environment today
  • Modeling analog behaviour with highly effective real number models
  • Applying assertion-based, metric-driven verification
  • Verifying low-power intent with dynamic and static methods
  • Floorplanning and integrating designs in a seamless, OA-interoperable flow
  • Analyzing timing and power for complex SoCs to prevent silicon re-spins

For one to gain true confidence, the session includes success stories from Cadence in terms of case studies. Also, IBM’s presence will be there with its latest technologies as foundry partner along with world class process design kits which enable high productivity and faster turn-around-time. It’s a day worth spent!! Register »

Complete details about the agenda can be found at –
http://www.cadence.com/cadence/events/Pages/event.aspx?eventid=768#sthash.e6Answas.dpuf

Any question about this event?

Send email to events@cadence.com


Mobile: A Death in the Family

Mobile: A Death in the Family
by Paul McLellan on 03-18-2013 at 3:49 pm

So Ericsson Mobile Platforms is to be shut down, with the loss of around 1600 jobs. Not to mention billions of dollars that ST and Ericsson sunk into the joint venture in an attempt to create a competitor to Qualcomm.

The history actually goes back a bit further. Nokia originally had an internal semiconductor design group and in 2007 they decided to get out of doing their own chip design and relying on Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics. This included transferring most of their chip designers to ST.

Then NXP, the old Philips Semiconductors, had a mobile design group, many of which were the old VLSI Technology engineers in Sophia Antipolis. They merged this group into ST but retained an ownership share, although later ST bought out this remaining share.

Next Ericsson had an internal group called Ericsson Mobile Platforms (EMP). Its business plan was to create IP (software, silicon IP etc) to license to people who wanted to get into mobile, especially in upcoming markets like China.

The final step in the creation of ST-Ericsson happened 4 years ago when Ericsson set up a joint-venture with ST and merged the ST design group along with the EMP group.

STE had two lead customers: Sony-Ericsson (based across the traffic circle from EMP in Lund, Sweden) and Nokia (based in Finland of course). But both these companies initially screwed up the transition to smartphones when Apple and Samsung took all the profits. STE suffered too as Nokia and Sony-Ericsson dramatically lost market share.

Last year Ericsson decided to get out of the Sony-Ericsson joint venture and sold their half to Sony. Sony is now doing OK in the smartphone market but I don’t think it is primarily built on STE chips.

Meanwhile, Nokia decided to put all their eggs in the Microsoft Windows Phone basket. But Windows Phone only runs on Qualcomm chips so STE lost that customer.

So despite apparently having reasonable technology, including for 4G LTE, STE didn’t really have any customers. Both Ericsson and ST announced that they would look for a strategic buyer but nobody was interested. Today they announced that they would shut the company down completely. Some personnel would be repatriated and brought back into the parent companies but not everyone. And some technology, such as the LTE modem design, will live on.


What killed them? Firstly, the transition from featurephones to smartphones blindsided them. Nokia was doing well in smartphones but then decided to switch to Microsoft, which explicitly is specified to run on Qualcomm Dragonball processors only. STE was screwed as a side-effect. They lost their biggest customer. And Sony-Ericsson only made the transition to smartphones work after Ericsson bailed on that JV.

Apple and Samsung design their own silicon and/or use Qualcomm for the modems, so there is only a limited market for 3rd party silicon, although with companies like Huawei and Lenovo starting to get traction it might be increasing. It is an interesting case study in looking at a market that is booming (semiconductor is flat outside mobile) but where it is still possible to fail.