Archive for August, 2013
Thursday, August 29th, 2013
Tezzaron Founder and CTO Bob Patti delivered a rousing keynote at the Silicon Valley Magma User Group meeting back in 2010, talking about his company’s 3D memory technology and how it offered a solution to the increased demands for on-chip capacity. I spoke to Patti following that speech, with details of the conversation posted here.
In the past 3 years, things have only gotten worse with respect to memory demands, so one might think Tezzaron’s solution is in even greater demand today. The problem, of course, is that Tezzaron Semiconductor is not the only company offering something that looks like ‘3D memory.’
In fact, 3 weeks ago at MemCon 2013 in Silicon Valley, I attended a keynote given by Micron Technology’s Mike Black singing the praises of his company’s Hybrid Memory Cube. Sitting in the audience, I tried to compare and contrast the Micron technology with what I believed to be the Tezzaron solution.
Happily, Tezzaron had a booth at MemCon, so it was possible to talk to somebody from the company about how they viewed Micron’s competing technology. Unfortunately, Tezzaron VP David Chapman was surrounded by a mob of interested people when I got to the booth, so I took his card and arranged to talk to him later about my many questions.
My number one question: Given the size of Micron and the ecosystem of partners they’ve assembled, the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium, is Tezzaron winning the battle of technology superiority, but losing the war for market share?
Tezzaron’s Chapman was not offended by my question. Instead, he started by framing his answer with a description of current market needs and continued from there. The following is a transcript of his comments.
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Tags: Bob Patti, bursty data dumps, David Chapman, DRAM, eFUSE repair, Fast SRAM, Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium, Locality of Reference, MemCon 2013, Micron, Novati Technologies, Tezzaron, Tungsten contacts
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Thursday, August 15th, 2013
Late last month, Synopsys announced another important addition to their portfolio, the DesignWare Sensor IP Subsystem. Per the company, “The new IP subsystem is optimized to process data from digital and analog sensors, offloading the host processor and enabling more efficient processing of the sensor data with ultra-low power.
“The hardware components [include] a power- and area-efficient DesignWare 32-bit ARC EM4 processor, digital peripherals such as I2C, SPI, ADC interface, and GPIO, and hardware accelerators for signal processing functions. The software components [include] a comprehensive library of digital signal functions utilized in higher-level applications such as analog and digital sensor fusion, and mathematical functions, filtering and interpolation. In addition, peripheral drivers ease integration of the I/O with the ARC EM processor.”
With announcements such as this, two questions come to mind: Why are companies like Synopsys still classified as EDA with some IP, and not IP with some EDA? And isn’t Synopsys setting itself up as competition for its customers by selling such a sophisticated chunk of IP?
I had a chance to speak by phone last week with Rich Collins, Marketing Manager for Synopsys’ IP Subsystems, who answered my second question with ease: “I don’t think so, because this [subsystem] is not a critical part of the SoC. Our customers are trying to achieve a higher order of functionality. It’s our value proposition that by using this subsystem, we save them months and months of design and verification effort. We help them get to market more quickly, we are not in competition with them.”
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Tags: DesignWare Sensor IP Subsystem, geo-fencing, Google Glass, iWatch, Rich Collins, Synopsys
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Thursday, August 1st, 2013
Bill Martin, President/VP of Engineering at E-System Design, has sent another thoughtful response to a blog regarding IP, in particular my post last week about the astonishing increase in the valuation of ARMH over the last 5 years.
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Years ago, Chris Rowen had a clear vision where EDA and IP would start to merge, given the complexities of both. He knew both could have a large impact on the resources and risks associated with creating an SoC. His vision was so compelling, Chris resigned from a great group within Synopsys to form his start-up, Tensilica.
At the time, EDA/IP/Customization were all difficult problems to resolve. By building larger blocks that automatically reconfigured and combined other aspects (examples: SW compiler/debugger for code that could add/delete instructions and a verification suite that reconfigured themselves based customers’ usage), the solution Chris created at Tensilica addressed SIP/Embedded SW/VIP and EDA.
Quite an ambitious undertaking, but over time as his solution was honed and matured, the industry saw the end result – a few months ago the large acquisition of Tensilica by Cadence. In fact, the deal was part of a trend. Look at the various EDA and IP acquisitions since 2008, those exceeding $100 million:
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Tags: Ansoft, Apache, ARM, Bill Martin, Cadence, Chris Rowen, Denali, E-System Design, IPextreme, Magma, Synopsys, Synplicity, Tensilica, VirageLogic
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