tag: Sonics

Coherency Becomes A Stack Of Issues
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling As complexity increases and the industry increasingly shifts away from ASICs to SoCs, the concept of coherency is beginning to look more like a stack of issues than a discrete piece of the design. There are at least five levels of coherency that need to be considered already, with more likely to surface as stacked die become mainstream over the next few years. Perhaps even mo... » read more

SoCs Go Mainstream
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The monolithic ASIC, which has been the bread-and-butter of chipmakers for decades, is giving way to systems on a chip among mainstream chipmakers and at mainstream process nodes. This shift has been overhyped, overpromised and slow to materialize. While SoCs have been common for years in mobile electronics and for high-performance platforms such as gaming consoles, they have... » 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

New Winners And Losers
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

The realignment of the semiconductor industry has begun, most of it beneath the radar screen. In a disaggregated supply chain, any piece in isolation looks insignificant. But taken together, these shifts begin to paint a picture of a broad realignment and refocusing of the entire industry that ultimately will cement the fortunes of some and create new winners and losers out of others. The fi... » read more

The Downside Of Derivatives
By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler From a planning perspective, creating derivative chips seems a straightforward task, but the process is much more complex than simply replacing or adding a peripheral—it starts with identifying the right team of engineers to perform that process. “One of the needs in the market is somebody to have vertical expertise to do derivative design and yet be cost-effec... » read more

Derivative ICs: A Look At The Options
By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the cost of designing and producing even moderately advanced SoCs skyrocketing, semiconductor companies and systems houses must find ways to defray the cost across a larger number of end uses than ever. As such many companies have adopted a platform-based derivative design approach, with that the platform serving as the first SoC design of a new family. That s... » read more

Different Tradeoffs
By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The push to “smaller, faster and cheaper” hasn’t changed since ICs were first introduced, but the context for those requirements is beginning to shift—with enormous consequences. What was once done on multiple chips continue to migrate to a single chip or package because of cost, but in some cases the decisions about goes where go well beyond an individual device to i... » 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

Different Tradeoffs
By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The push to “smaller, faster and cheaper” hasn’t changed since ICs were first introduced, but the context for those requirements is beginning to shift—with enormous consequences. What was once done on multiple chips continue to migrate to a single chip or package because of cost, but in some cases the decisions about goes where go well beyond an individual device to i... » read more

Reverse Engineering
By Ed Sperling - 26 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Fabs and foundries frequently have been the savior of flawed designs, fixing problems such as power and performance, identifying design issues and often developing solutions to those problems. Over the next couple of process nodes, and in stacked die that will span multiple processes, there will be far fewer saves coming from the back end. Double and triple patterning, stress... » read more

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