The Power Of Dark Silicon

By Frank Ferro - 26 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro Even though the cloud is permeating everything we do today, I was recently reminded that it's even omnipresent far outside the walls of tech. With all the TV ads, as well as our most prominent airports and U.S. highways peppered with cloud-based billboards, even our parents know how to properly use cloud in sentence today. But to hear about the cloud from the pulpit at church on... » read more

IP That Makes IP Work

By Frank Ferro - 28 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro Just how important are IP subsystems to complex SoC designs? It appears much more than you may have thought just a few months ago. With the emergence of SoCs that now support the cloud computing revolution and every major cloud-connected device, SoC complexity is increasing at a dizzying pace. We commonly now see increasing number of IP cores, cores from multiple sources, di... » read more

Clearing Up Cloud-Based SoCs

By Frank Ferro - 24 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro With each passing month, the cloud is taking the semiconductor market by storm—just like it did in the enterprise years ago. Take nVidia’s recent Kepler GPU announcement for cloud computing. This device provides low-latency access to the cloud for gaming, giving gamers performance and access to the latest content without being tied to a game console. Another example is Appli... » read more

A Cloud-Connected World

By Frank Ferro - 26 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro If you're paying attention and/or using a smart phone every day (and perhaps it's safer to assume the latter) the ‘cloud’ is no longer a buzzword. The cloud has become grounded in our daily reality. How’s that for a paradox and a visual? But at a minimum, it has become more like a punch line in every consumer's day—without even thinking about it. Projections show that... » read more

Speed Matters

By Frank Ferro - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro Speed is the shiny object, the undisputed premium, and in many ways, the ultimate carrot with customers when designing advanced SoCs. There are a few moments when the conversation temporarily shifts to area, or some special feature, but we always come back to speed, or more specifically, frequency. This is without a doubt the first and most important requirement ‘gate’ to pa... » read more

Mobile Mania Redux

By Frank Ferro - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro As I prepare to hit Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, I get the feeling that this will be a ‘do-over’ of last month’s CES, only without all the HD and 3D TVs. Although wireless infrastructure and applications are a big part of MWC, at the device level, tablets and smartphones will continue to dominate all the discussions. Déjà vu, anyone? Yet the reality is we are in ... » read more

New Electronic World Order

By Frank Ferro - 26 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro Analysts agree that much of the semiconductor growth over the next few years will be in the mobile market segments—smart phones, tablets and ultra-books, in particular. At the recent CES, there was no lack of these devices on display, all which are competing to cash in on the cachet that Apple has developed around these products. Although ultra-books will eventually just be no... » read more

Looking Back To The Future

By Frank Ferro - 14 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Frank Ferro As I'm reading through year-end articles on the top technologies of 2011, along with predictions of what's hot for 2012, I naturally start to reflect on the emerging technologies for the year ahead—and will anyone see them coming? Undoubtedly this was another year where rapid technology adoption changed our behavior throughout the day. It was the year of the tablet, the sma... » read more

A Secret Weapon

By Frank Ferro - 17 Nov, 2011 - Comments: 0

By John Bainbridge One of the major advances in SoC design methodologies more than a decade ago was the decoupling of the network-on-chip (NoC) from the individual IP cores throughout the SoC. This was (and is) accomplished through the use of carefully specified sockets such as OCP, the old VSIA VCI and (somewhat later) AMBA-AXI, which establish clear boundaries of communication responsibility... » read more

eDRAM: No Brainer…But No Takers?

By Various Writers - 20 Oct, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Steve Hamilton Designers in the consumer electronics market—mobile in particular—are constantly looking for new ways to reduce cost and power while increasing performance. This is far from novel. With consumers’ unrelenting demand for more features at lower prices, you would think semiconductor companies would jump when confronted with a technology that gives them a real competitive e... » read more

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