Archive for April, 2015
Thursday, April 30th, 2015
It’s the kind of announcement that regularly emanates from IP companies: “Uniquify today announced it developed a DDR3 IP solution for Samsung Electronics’ power-efficient 28nm LPP foundry process that is now in volume production for multiple product lines, including consumer and mobile applications.”
The thing is, there are two bigger take-aways from this announcement than the specifics of the news. One is that news about 28 nanometers is still making news. The way marketing bravado in the industry runs, one would think 10 nanometers is upon us completely.
The other thing is that we’re not talking here about Samsung planning to adopt Uniquify’s DDR3; we’re talking about Samsung using these things in volume production. A very different kettle of fish, and something that IP companies often have so much trouble getting their customers to acknowledge. [Same holds true, of course, for EDA vendors as well.]
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Tags: 28LPP, 28nm, DDR3, Samsung Electronics, Uniquify
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Thursday, April 23rd, 2015
I’ve got a friend who received an Android Wear (read “watch”) as a gift earlier this year. In the last several months, he’s become addicted to wearing the darn thing although its usefulness is distinctly limited: He can check the time and screen calls without digging a phone out of his pocket. Oh yeah, and when messages and/or emails come in, he knows straightaway.
Other than being a fascinating toy, however, and something to diddle with – particularly for those who like the openness of Android – Wear is really not much more than a distinctive fashion statement and not too much of that.
Nonetheless, now that Apple’s claiming more stupendous success with yet another highly over-hyped product launch (read, “the Apple Watch”), it’s time to re-consider the importance, even gravitas, of this Android Wear thing. After all, let’s not just lay down in the road and let Apple run over us yet again. Let’s cheer on these Android Wear users. Let’s celebrate anybody willing to stand up to the Apple juggernaut. Yay!
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Android Wear, Apple Watch, Dick Tracy, Google, IoT
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Thursday, April 16th, 2015
Building on last year’s success, the 2015 Design Automation Conference in San Francisco is offering even more substantial content in the track centered on silicon IP and design reuse. Reading through the list of topics, speakers, and companies set to be featured across a diverse set of sessions from June 7-9 at Moscone Center, two things are obvious.
One, a lot of work has been done to assemble all of this. And two, it’s possible the thorny issues surrounding IP reuse may never go away: integration, verifying quality, convincing staff to use design blocks that originate outside of the group, and dealing with the massive amounts of data that IP selection and reuse generates.
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Tags: Aditya Mukherjee, Ann Mutschler, Bernie Delay, Bob Doud, Brenda Westcott, Brian Bailey, Clark Chen, Darren Jones, Dave Bursky, Drew Wingard, Ed Sperling, Farzad Zarrinfar, Frank Schirrmeister, Heather Monigan, John Blyler, John Koeter, Krishna Yarlagadda, Leah Schuth, Lewis Chu, Luis Paris, Martin Lund, Navraj Nandra, Raik Brinkmann, Saurabh Kumar, Shankar Krishnamoorthy, Suk Lee, Surya Hotah, Thomas Wong, Tom Anderson, Toshio Nakama, Warren Savage
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Wednesday, April 1st, 2015
Early Monday morning, Synopsys announced several new bits have been added to their impressive bucket of IP blocks, a new family of DesignWare processors targeted at vision applications. With an honorable pedigree – descent from the ARC technology that came to Synopsys via the 2010 acquisition of Virage Logic – the processors announced on March 30th are designed to be embedded in SoCs, specifically to meet a growing need to digitally “distinguish smiles from frowns, faces from cars, baby carriages from trees or dogs, and even sky from ground.”
These needs were articulated in a March 26th phone call with Synopsys Senior Manager of Product Marketing Mike Thompson, who enthusiastically explained, “The vision market will grow dramatically over the next several years. The next 10-to-15 years will be seen as a paradigm-shift period in how we interact with technology.”
That’s why he’s delighted Synopsys will surpass other players in driving that shift: “There are already a few vision processors available [on the market], and they are largely programmable. We took a slightly different approach, however, with the new DesignWare EV Processors we’ve developed.
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Tags: ARC, ARC MetaWare Development Toolkit, ARM, Convolutional Neural Network, DesignWare, DesignWare EV Processors, Google, John Koeter, Mike Thompson, NEST, OpenCV, OpenVX, Synopsys, Virage Logic
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