The Week In Review: Aug. 30

By Ann Steffora Mutschler
Continuing its drive towards enabling the Internet of Things (IoT), Renesas recently licensed a third Tensilica core from Cadence, this time the ConnX D2 DSP, which has acceleration packages optimized for IoT wired and wireless modem standards. Renesas previously licensed the Tensilica HiFi Audio DSP and ConnX BBE16 cores.

In another deal for Cadence, Mellanox Technologies is using the Palladium XP Verification Computing Platform for the development of its server and storage products. Mellanox said the hardware emulation platform allowed it to improve time to market of its interconnect products by three months.

Imagination Technologies said it significantly expanded its partnership with Mentor Graphics for Sourcery CodeBench development tools components for MIPS CPUs, given that the open-source software platform is widely supported. There are now MIPS-optimized implementations of all Sourcery CodeBench editions, including for the upcoming MIPS32 and MIPS64-based Series5 ‘Warrior’ generation of cores.

Debunking the conventional wisdom that has said it’s cheaper to produce products in Asia than in North America, IHS Inc. has discovered during a teardown of the Motorola Moto X –assembled in the United States – that the bill of materials and manufacturing cost is in the same range as market-leading products made in Asia.

According to IHS, the total BOM of the Moto X amounts to $214, according to its preliminary teardown results. Including the $12 manufacturing expense, the cost to produce the Moto X amounts to $226, which puts it approximately in the middle of the combined BOM and manufacturing costs of the leading smartphone models, Apple Inc.’s iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy S4. The U.S. version of the Galaxy S4 with 16 gigabytes (GByte) of NAND flash memory carries a total BOM and manufacturing cost of $237. Meanwhile, the 16Gbyte iPhone 5 costs $207. Even though the manufacturing expense of the Moto X is $3.50 to $4.00 more than these phones, the total cost to make Motorola’s smartphone is only 9% more than the iPhone 5—and about 5 percent less than the Galaxy S4, IHS reported.