RISC-V Gains Its Footing


The RISC-V instruction-set architecture, which started as a UC Berkeley project to improve energy efficiency, is gaining steam across the industry. The RISC-V Foundation's member roster gives an indication who is behind this effort. Members include Google, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Rambus, Samsung, NXP, Micron, IBM, GlobalFoundries, UltraSoC, Siemens, among many others. One of the key markets for... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Finance Vectra raised $36 million in Series D funding led by Atlantic Bridge Capital. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund and Nissho Electronics also participated in this funding round along with returning investors Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, IA Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Wipro Ventures, bringing Vectra’s total funding to date to $123 million. Vectra will use the... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 21


Mentor's Colin Walls posits that one part of the reason modern code has so many bugs may be the way we talk about them, and it's time for a change in terminology. Following up on a post about the challenges of bringing digital literacy to an area where many are unable to read, Cadence's Madhavi Rao looks at the impact agriculture-focused IoT technologies could have on rural areas in India. ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Arm unveiled a new suite of IP focused on machine learning for edge devices. Currently dubbed Project Trillium, it includes the Arm ML processor, the second-generation Arm Object Detection (OD) processor, and open-source Arm NN software. The ML processor provides more than 4.6 TOPs in mobile environments with efficiency of 3 TOPs/W. People detection is a focus of the OD processo... » read more

SoC + AI = SiPx


The market for third-party semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) continues to exhibit growth well beyond the (CAGR) Compound Annual Growth Rate for the semiconductor industry. Semico just completed an in-depth analysis and breakdown of the SIP market in a report called Licensing, Royalty and Service Revenues For 3rd Party SIP (SC105-18). The 2017 to 2022 CAGR is projected to be 10.9%, about... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 14


Mentor's Matthew Hogan takes a look at why it's important to establish a baseline reliability verification process and how foundry rule decks fit in. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi digs into the issues with fitness tracker Strava's heatmap, how it could be manipulated, and why the risks of big data analytics go beyond wearables. Cadence's Paul McLellan points to research showing how easy it can ... » read more

Chip Aging Accelerates


Reliability is becoming an increasingly important proof point for new chips as they are rolled out in new markets such as automotive, cloud computing and industrial IoT, but actually proving that a chip will function as expected over time is becoming much more difficult. In the past, reliability generally was considered a foundry issue. Chips developed for computers and phones were designed ... » read more

The Value Of Trust


It took 40 years for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone to go from 10% to 40% global saturation. The smartphone repeated that market penetration in less than a tenth of the time. But even the success of the smartphone is being eclipsed by the lightning pace at which Internet of Things (IoT) products are being born, with Gartner predicting that 95% of all technology products will be IoT-capable... » read more

Embedded Display IP Solution For 4K Resolutions


By Licinio Sousa, Synopsys, and Vassilis Androutsopoulos, Arm To meet consumers’ demands for high-resolution content and visual quality, high-end smartphones are moving from wide quad HD (WQHD) displays to ultra-high-resolution 4K displays. For AR/VR applications, since the display is closer to the eyes and must maintain visual quality, more pixels and high refresh rates are needed. Higher... » read more

Not All Ops Are Created Equal


Efficient and compact neural network models are essential for enabling the deployment on mobile and embedded devices. In this work, we point out that typical design metrics for gauging the efficiency of neural network architectures – total number of operations and parameters – are not sufficient. These metrics may not accurately correlate with the actual deployment metrics such as energy an... » read more

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