Posts Tagged ‘GSA’
Thursday, October 5th, 2017
Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems, a 32-bit CPU vendor, became a member of the ESD Alliance in 2016 and was described at the time as “the first IP company from China to join.”
Founded in 2001, C-Sky has “developed 7 types of embedded CPUs covering a wide range of embedded applications including smart devices in IoT, digital audio and video, information security, network and communications, industrial control and automotive electronics. It is the only embedded CPU volume provider in China with its own instruction set architecture, the Yun-on-Chip architecture developed in conjunction with Alibaba.”
C-Sky is a growing IP company serving an enormous market. I spoke recently by phone with Dr. Xiaoning Qi, CEO at C-Sky, who was in California attending meetings. No stranger to Silicon Valley, he previously served at Intel, Rambus, Synopsys, and Sun, after completing his Ph.D. under Prof. Robert Dutton at Stanford.
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Tags: Aart de Geus, Alibaba, ARM, Asia-Pacific Leadership Council, Bob Smith, C-Sky Microsystem Corp., Chenming Hu, Chi-Foon Chan, Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association, ESD Alliance, GSA, IEEE, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Microsoft, NB-IoT, Rambus, Robert Dutton, SMIC, Stanford, Subhasish Mitra, Sun Microsystems, Synopsys, TSMC, Wally Rhines, Xiaoning Qi, ZTE
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Thursday, May 19th, 2016
It’s a poorly kept secret that Bob Smith was brought in as Executive Director of EDAC last year to shake things up, to breathe new life into the sails of a somewhat becalmed organization. Well, in the category of be careful what you ask for, here’s how things have gone so far:
New companies have joined the consortium, the newest member of the Board of Directors is not a CEO, a plethora of monthly panels have engaged the industry in thought-provoking discussions about innovation vis-à-vis commercial enterprise, a marketing deal has been struck with Semico, and the whole friggin’ organization has been re-branded as the ESD Alliance to reflect an intent to get more IP guys, more Embedded guys, and more Yet-to-be-identified guys into the alliance than just the traditional anchor tenants from EDA.
But none of this comes close to the potential impact of the latest disruptive idea that ESDA is proposing: The founding of a brand new working group that could very well redefine the whole semiconductor supply chain: The ESD Alliance System Scaling Working Group.
Astonishing.
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Tags: Accellera, Bob Smith, EDAC, ESD Alliance, GSA, Herb Reiter, IEEE, Sematech, Semi, Semico, Si2, System Scaling Working Group
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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, May 1st, 2014
Two things happened as a result of falling and breaking my right arm early on the morning of April 19th in Monterey: I instantly became a ‘Lefty’ for the first time in my life, and I missed Warren Savage’s presentation at EDPS later that day.
Warren is CEO and President of IPextreme, and I kid you not when I say that what he doesn’t know about the IP industry isn’t worth knowing. That’s why I wanted to hear Warren’s talk, and why I was very happy to talk to him this week about my Dick Tracy keychain project.
How do I learn to be a knowledgeable customer of the IP industry, I asked Warren, particularly when my hypothetical wearable is something I could really use right now: An SoC-based gadget, built with oodles of IP, to wear on my left wrist that’s got one small button to remotely unlock my car, one that will start my car, one that will open or close the garage door, one that will tell me if I’ve got enough milk in the fridge, one that will turn the heat up and down at home even if I’m not there, and prosaically, one that will show me the time.
Of course, now that I can’t use my right hand to push the buttons on the device strapped to my left wrist, I no longer want buttons. I want the thing to respond to voice commands – “Unlock.” “Ignition.” “Garage.” “Got milk?” “Set temp.” “Time?” – simple instructions that should only produce results when it’s my voice and nobody else’s.
Warren was extremely informative during our phone call. He understood I wasn’t looking for specific help with my design, but how to shop for the IP to go into my design. I started by telling him that my research into IP has so far included conversations with:
CAST – Hal Barbour, Nikos Zervas, and Paul Lindemann
Sonics – Grant Pierce, Raymond Brinks
Adapt IP – Mac McNamara
S3 – Dermot Barry, Darren Hobbs
To further clarify the information gleaned from these people, my questions for Warren were very succinct, as were his answers.
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Tags: Adapt IP, ARM, CAST, EDPS, Faraday, GSA, Imagination Technologies, IPextreme, S3 Group, Sonics, Synopses, Unichip, Warren Savage
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Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
Bill Martin, President/VP of Engineering at E-System Design, sent a thoughtful response to my April 25th blog regarding Accellera’s recently released Soft IP Tagging 1.0 standard. I appreciate the time he took to clarify the ongoing need for such a standard.
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I was part of VSIA when Kathy Werner was driving the IP tagging standards. I am happy this one from Accellera is now out [Soft IP Tagging 1.0] and the various users can determine how best to apply it. It is a large step forward, but only one of many required.
Unfortunately, the current system for IP tagging can be easily ‘hacked’ to disable any tracking. Simple text editing the source code and removing a few lines can completely remove the tag. But Accellera’s standard is a good first step to hone the standard; understanding how it works and does not work for various constituents.
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Tags: Accellera, Bill Martin, E-System Design, GSA, GSA Interest Group, GSA IP ROI Calculator, IPextreme, Kathy Warner, Soft IP Tagging 1.0 standard, VSIA, Warren Savage
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Thursday, August 23rd, 2012
Behind Warren Savage’s calm and courteous demeanor beats the heart of a revolutionary: A guy who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk of growing his beloved IP industry through the most radical of ideas – cooperation.
 Warren is the founder and CEO of IPextreme, a Silicon-Valley based company helping other companies commercialize their IP, small nuggets of pure gold that would otherwise enjoy only internal use. With the assist of Warren & Co, that gold is beefed up, intensely documented, and then licensed to users outside the firewall who then have access to robust 3rd-party design blocks, yielding revenue back to the IP developers they would not otherwise enjoy.
So that’s Warren’s business, but what’s really impressive about Warren is the other half of his professional involvement: working through the GSA [Global Semiconductor Alliance] to enhance the well-being of all players in the IP industry, not just his customers. Warren chairs GSA’s Working Group on IP, and leads the Leadership Group subset within that Working Group.
Warren also founded and continues to lead Constellations, a consortium-like group of IP vendors who meet regularly to discuss business issues, develop joint solutions, and host invitation-only events for their customers. The next Constellations event is coming up in early October.
Clearly, Warren Savage is a revolutionary, someone who believes a rising tide raises all boats in the IP industry and acts vigorously on that belief. Warren and I spoke by phone on August 22nd.
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Tags: 3rd-party IP, ARM, ColdFire, Compact JTAG, Constellations, DAC, EDAC, Freescale, Global Semiconductor Alliance, GSA, GSA IP Working Group, Infineon, Intel, IPextreme, MIPS, PowerPC, Reuse Methodology Manual, Silicon IP, Synopsys, VSIA, Warren Savage
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