Arm Goes For Performance


At the recent Linley Processor Conference, Arm presented two processors. This was regarded as so confidential that the original pre-conference version of the presentations didn't contain the Arm one, even though that pdf was only put online about an hour before. But most of the outline of what they presented they already talked about in May, a few months ago. I said recently that this seem... » read more

Reconfigurable eFPGA For Aerospace Applications


Market research reports indicate about 10% of all dollar revenue of FPGA chips is for use in aerospace applications, and DARPA/DoD reports indicate about one-third of all dollar volume of ICs purchased by U.S. aerospace are FPGAs. FPGAs clearly are very important for aerospace applications because of a combination of short development time and the long mission life of many aerospace applica... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Imagination will sell its MIPS business to Tallwood, a California-based venture capital firm, for $65m in cash. The sale is expected to close in October. The rest of Imagination is slated to be sold to Canyon Bridge for £550 million in cash (~$740 million), a deal dependent on the MIPS sale. The Chinese-backed investment firm has featured recently in the news for its attempted purchas... » read more

Making Waves In Deep Learning


A little more than two and a half years ago I wrote Making Waves in Low-Power Design, an article about a company (at the time) called Wave Semiconductor. Fast forward the the recent Linley Processor Conference, Wave Computing’s CTO Chris Nicol gave the audience an update on the company’s eagerly awaited and soon (planned for October) to be taped-out 16K-core dataflow processor for deep lea... » read more