Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Allegro DVT acquired Amphion Semiconductor, bringing together two developers of video codec IP. Allegro DVT said the merger will make it the first semiconductor IP company to offer commercially available hardware-based, real-time encoder and decoder solutions for the new AV1 video encoding format for SoC implementations, supporting 4K/UHD up to 8K. Based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Amphion wa... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Autos


Products/Services The Networking for Autonomous Vehicles Alliance announces that Marvell Semiconductor is joining the NAV Alliance following its acquisition of Aquantia. Fourteen companies are in the industry organization, including Bosch, Continental, Nvidia, and Volkswagen. “The NAV Alliance is developing the platforms that will create the future of transportation and we believe that Multi... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 16


Arm's Greg Yeric dives into the challenges facing the semiconductor industry and potential solutions that could possibly have huge impacts toward the year 2030, from DNA self-assembly to new physics, in an adaptation of his wide-ranging Arm TechCon keynote. Cadence's Paul McLellan considers Google's recent quantum computing achievement, what quantum supremacy really means, and where it leave... » read more

Pushing Memory Harder


In an optimized system, no component is waiting for another component while there is useful work to be done. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the processor/memory interface. Put simply, memory cannot keep up. Accessing memory is slow, and it can consume a significant fraction of the power budget. And the general consensus is this problem is not going away anytime soon, despite effort... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Dialog Semiconductor will acquire Creative Chips for approximately $80 million cash, with contingent consideration of up to $23 million. The move will expand Dialog's Industrial IoT portfolio, adding Creative Chips' industrial Ethernet and other mixed-signal products for connecting large numbers of IIoT sensors to industrial networks. Based in Bingen, Germany, Creative Chips was founded in... » read more

Week in Review – IoT, Security, Autos


Products/Services Arm TechCon got under way with a series of announcements. Arm is a founding member of the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium, along with General Motors, Toyota Motor, DENSO, Continental, Bosch, NXP Semiconductors, and Nvidia. More information on the consortium is available here. “Imagine a world where vehicles are able to perceive their dynamically changing environment... » read more

Shift Left Power-Aware Static Verification


Next-generation SoCs with advanced graphics, computing, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are posing new unseen challenges in Low Power Verification. These techniques can introduce critical bugs into a design, especially when the power-management infrastructure interacts with signals that cross clock or reset domains. This can create additional clock-domain cro... » read more

Focus Shifts To Wasted Power


Mobile phones made the industry aware of power, but now the focus is shifting to the total energy needed to perform a task. Activity that is unnecessary to perform the intended task is wasted power, and reducing it requires some new methodologies and structural changes within development teams. There is a broadening awareness about power. "The companies doing SoCs for mobile lead the charge ... » read more

Using Emulators For Power/Performance Tradeoffs


Emulation is becoming the tool of choice for power and performance tradeoffs, scaling to almost unlimited capacity for complex chips used in data centers, AI/ML systems and smart phones. While emulation has long been viewed as an important but expensive asset for chipmakers trying to verify and debug chips, it is now viewed as an essential component for design optimization and analysis much ... » read more

Analyzing Testbench Design Performance Using Verdi Performance Analyzer


Performance continues to be key factor for the design of any complex system-on-chip (SoC). Moreover, complexity is increasing every day, which poses a challenge for engineers to track performance of the design, yet they are tasked to continuously increase chip performance. This paper describes the challenge to measure design performance and explains how Verdi Performance Analyzer enables run ti... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →