Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
Thursday, September 7th, 2017
Talking to Dean Drako is probably a little like talking to Elon Musk: Both men have their fingers in multiple pies. In Drako’s case, and apropos to semiconductor design, one pie includes the IP and EDA industries.
Dean Drako founded IC Manage in 2003, a company whose products are targeted at IC designers who need help coordinating their efforts, integrating third-party IP into their design equation, and accelerating design. Interestingly, at the same time Drako was founding IC Manage, he was also founding Barracuda Networks, and ran both companies simultaneously for a number of years.
Today 14 years later, Drako still serves as President and CEO of IC Manage, but is ‘only’ on the board of Barracuda. Lest you think his plate is not full enough, however, he’s also currently President and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks.
Prior to our phone call last week, I researched Drako on Wikipedia: “Drako has written a number of articles on Open Source, Big Data, and SoC design. He is a frequently invited speaker on the topic of entrepreneurship [and] is a holder of 27 patents, including patents in network security, network protocols, digital circuits, software, biochemical processes, and sporting equipment.”
Yeah, pretty much just like talking to Elon Musk.
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Tags: Apple, Barracuda Networks, Cadence, Dassault, Dean Drako, Design Acceleration, Drako Motors, Eagle Eye Networks, EDAC, ESD Alliance, IC Manage, MatrixOne, NVIDIA, Shiv Sikand, Synchronicity
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Wednesday, July 12th, 2017
It’s been a year since two cataclysmic news bits hit the wires, the two stories not unrelated.
The UK decided to Brexit the EU on 23 June 2016, and ARM announced it had been sold to Tokyo-based SoftBank three weeks later, on 18 July 2016. For some, these developments would have been unthinkable up to the moment they unfolded, but now they’re both a reality.
Article 50 was triggered by the British PM on 29 March 2017, and the UK will no longer be in the EU as of March 2019.
ARM is no longer publicly traded, and although it was once the crown jewel of Britain’s technical portfolio, it is now a wholly owned Japanese enterprise. Or at least it was, until 7 March 2017 when SoftBank announced an even more astonishing bit of news.
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Tags: Apple, ARM, Article 50, Brexit, ESD Alliance, European Union, Foxconn, Gareth Corfield, Qualcomm, Saudi Arabia, Sharp, Simon Segars, SoftBank, Theresa May, UAE, Vision Fund
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Thursday, May 4th, 2017
It’s not been pretty of late in the world of IP. Imagination’s valuation tanked when it was revealed in early April that the company might be losing Apple as a customer. Imagination says it’s going to fight this development, but a different ending to the story of David and Goliath comes to mind in that declaration.
Then this week, that same Imagination announced it was selling MIPS – a company it bought back in 2012 with great fanfare for [a mere] $60 million. [It’s true, MIPS’ patent portfolio was worth a lot more.]
Also this week, TSMC announced it is charging a former employee with IP theft: The former employee is alleged to have stolen manufacturing data from TSMC specifically related to Nvidia and AMD chip production, taken it across the Straights of Taiwan, and turned it over to his new employer in the PRC, HLMC.
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Tags: AMD, Apple, HLMC, Imagination, MIPS, NVIDIA, TSMC
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Thursday, October 15th, 2015
There’s a term for engineering solutions that are simple, necessary and sufficient. The term is elegant. And that’s the term that must be applied to the latest announcement out of IPextreme.
The company has come up with a simple, elegant process whereby IP blocks can be assigned a fingerprint, an unalterable bit of code that can be attached to the block and stays with it as that IP passes along into a chip design. The fingerprint then allows that IP to be detected, using IPextreme’s DNA analysis tool, by everyone involved with that chip going forward. Where everyone includes not just the engineers, but the lawyers and accountants in semiconductor companies who need to verify that a particular IP block in a commercial design has been legally procured and paid for.
Because, ultimately IPextreme’s fingerprinting scheme is about above-board licensing of IP, and guaranteeing legitimate revenue for the companies that make third-party IP and design reuse a reality. It’s that simple and elegant.
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Tags: Apple, Chip DNA Analysis, Core Store, IPextreme, Silicon Valley IP User Conference, Warren Savage
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Monday, July 28th, 2014
There are three kinds of written word in the world today: books, newspapers/magazines, and all of the rest of it which now lives on the shifting sands of an ever-evolving electronic substrate. Even today, however, even as those ‘effervescent electrons’ garner more and more readers, it’s books-on-paper that continue to hold the most caché, the most gravitas-laden sense of permanence, and the most awe-inspring-for-the-ages kind of wow factor: Really? You wrote a book? Wow!
Hence, when a 220-page book-on-paper called Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry was made available to the EDA community at the 51st annual Design Automation Conference this past month in San Francisco, it was worth noting for several reasons: For the gravitas of the offering; For the permanence of the tome; And for the price, which thanks to eSilicon Corp. was free to all for the taking.
Written by SemiWiki.com gurus Daniel Nenni and Paul McLellan, this Fabulous Fabless book-on-paper was handed out during a buzzy networking event on the spacious East Side of Moscone Center early one evening during the week of DAC in June. At that noisy, ebullient reception, the libations were flowing liberally and so was the printed word.
Anyone milling about in the crowd quickly became the proud owner of Nenni/McLellan’s cheery, well-written history of the world – that special world consisting of everything termed “technology” since 1947 – and could even get signed copies, if they were able to elbow their way across the room to where the authors were perched side-by-side at a table with the express purpose of applying ink-to-paper on the front piece of their book.
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Tags: Altera, AMD, Apple, ARM, Arteris, Atrenta, C&T, Cadence, Calypto, CEVA, Chartered, Cliosoft, Coventer, Daniel Nenni, Docea, eSilicon, Fabless Semiconductor, GlobalFoundries, GSA, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Jasper, Mentor, Paul McLellan, SemiWiki.com, Sidense, Silvaco, Solido, Sonics, Synopsys, Tanner, TSMC, UMC, VLSI Technology, Xilinx
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Thursday, December 5th, 2013
When somebody runs for public office, they usually have several stump speeches that can be trouped out in front of the appropriate audience: “I’m very pro-labor” when the candidate’s standing in front of a manufacturing facility. “I believe government should be pro-business” when they’re standing in front of the Chamber of Commerce.
In recent years, I’ve heard Steve Wozniak speak numerous times and to me it seems he has at least 2 different stump speeches: “Technology is wonderful and is changing the world for the better” when talking at the Computer History Museum. “Steve Jobs made a lot of money off of things I invented” when talking in front of engineers at DAC, or a bunch of well-heeled suburbanites as he did this week at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night.
The Steve Jobs bit probably plays well in front of engineers who often feel under-appreciated, or sense that Sales & Marketing makes more than their share of the winnings from intellectual property developed and refined by Design & Engineering. The Steve Jobs bit may not play so well, however, in front of mid-Peninsula suburbanites who drive late-model BMWs, Mercedes and the odd Tesla here and there, never chew with their mouths open, and passionately want their children to behave, excel on their SATs, and go to Ivy League schools. These people believe in Steve Jobs – they all carry iPhones and, more importantly, all believe in the money they’ve earned by investing in Apple here in the new millennium.
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Tags: Apple, Atari, Attribution, Computer History Museum, De Anza College, Homebrew Computer Club, IBM 360, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, U.C. Berkeley, Woz
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Thursday, October 18th, 2012
The MIPI Alliance was founded in 2003 by STMicro, ARM, Nokia and TI. In 2004, Intel, Motorola, Samsung and Philips joined. Today, there are over 240 companies in the Alliance, 18 working groups, and over 5000 participating individuals. Following his presentation during the general session at SAME Forum in Sophia Antipolis, I had a chance to speak with STMicro’s Joel Huloux, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the MIPI Alliance.
Huloux differentiated between the work of the MIPI Alliance and OCP-IP: “OCP-IP is more related to the inside of the chip. It is very useful for interconnect when you buy IP to put in your design. If you look at MIPI Alliance, however, we do not deal with internal bus processors, or networks. We deal with the interface which is external to the chip, particularly in a mobile device, the interface between the chip and the display, camera, and so on. There is no competition at all between OCP-IP and MIPI Alliance.”
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Tags: Apple, ARM, Google, Intel, Joel Huloux, Microsoft, MIPI Alliance, Motorola, Nokia, OCP-IP, Philips, SAME Forum, Samsung, STMicro, TI
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