Posts Tagged ‘U.C. Berkeley’
Thursday, November 2nd, 2017
U.C. Berkeley Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has just been named non-Executive Chairman of UltraSoC, an IP provider based in Cambridge. He was in Rome when we spoke this week by phone about the news.
UltraSoC CEO Rupert Baines was also on the conference call, dialing in from the UK, while I was in Silicon Valley. The conversation began with a discussion of Sangiovanni-Vincentelli’s ongoing research work in Singapore.
Three sentences, four geographies: What more proof is needed that the semiconductor industry is indeed global?
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Tags: Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Atlante Ventures, Cadence, CEVA, Coadasip, Elvees, HiSilicon/Huaweei, Imagination, ISO 26262, Lauterrbach, MIT, Movidius, Netspeed, NRF CREATE, RISC-V, Rupert Baines, SiFive, Singapore, Sondrel, Synopsys, Technical University of Munich, U.C. Berkeley, UltraSoC
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Thursday, January 19th, 2017
At the ESD Alliance panel on the Cadence campus Wednesday night, it was Vista Ventures’ Jim Hogan who suggested the little open-source processor architecture called RISC-V will prove itself to be a plucky survivor when looming market realities hit 800-pound proprietary vendors like ARM and Intel. Hogan suggested RISC-V is positioned to survive that pending apocalypse just like “the mammals after the asteroid.”
Pretty dramatic stuff.
Hence it should not have been surprising, at the end of the 75-minute discussion on stage between Jim Hogan and Microsemi’s Ted Speers and SiFive’s Yunsup Lee, that I raised my hand and asked why Simon Segars was not in the room. After all, Simon Segars is both CEO of ARM and a key member of the Board of the Alliance that organized the Hogan-Speers-Lee program – a program where the emerging RISC-V movement was described as poised to upend the primacy of ARM etc.
Hogan responded to my question without answering: “Look, ARM is challenging by serving the low-cost processor market. License fees, royalty fees – that is what ARM wants for their low-power edge-based device. I think it was Simon, for example, who started talking to The Street about his economic strategy. It’s not really about what the best technology is, but about the economics. This is what gets the traction, and ARM will respond in an economic way.”
“Yes,” Ted Speers added, “and Intel and Imagination will also respond.”
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Tags: ARM, Dave Paterson, ESD Alliance, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Jim Hogan, John Hennessy, Linley Group, Microsemi, Olivier Bernard, Rick O'Connor, RISC-V, RISC-V Foundation, SiFive, Simon Segars, Stanford, Ted Speers, U.C. Berkeley, Vista Ventures, Yunsup Lee
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Thursday, January 5th, 2017
One of your New Year’s Resolutions should be to further understand the philosophy, technology, and implications of the RISC-V movement. And there will be no better way to follow through on that resolution than to attend the upcoming ESD Alliance discussion on the topic.
In a nod to the best in situational irony, the Alliance is hosting an evening event in Silicon Valley on January 18th specifically to discuss this open source processor architecture, which per some has the potential to turn ARM’s market dominance on its ear.
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Tags: ARM, BSD License, DAC, Dave Patterson, ESC Boston, ESD Alliance, Google, IoT Meetup, Jim Hogan, Krste Asanovic, MIT, Oracle, Rick O'Connor, RISC-V, RISC-V Foundation, SiFive, U.C. Berkeley, Yunsup Lee
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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, January 3rd, 2013
For the first time ever, organizers of the International Electron Devices Meeting honored a member of their community by providing a platform for conversation about translating innovation into business success. The premier event on December 12th in San Francisco featured an hour-long, on-stage, lunch-time interview with Marvell Technology Group VP and GM of Communications and Consumer Business Weili Dai.
Ms. Dai co-founded Marvell in 1995 with her husband, Sehat Sutardja, and his brother, Pantas Sutardja. Together they have built an organization which now stands as the fifth largest fabless semiconductor company in the world, one with 7000 employees and an international clientele. If you wanted to know more about Marvell, the information’s out there in spades. If you wanted to know more about the personal story behind Marvell, however, you should have been at the IEDM Entrepreneurs Lunch on December 12th. Ms. Dai gave a compelling interview that day, providing as succinct a summary of what it takes to start and build a company as one could ever hope to hear.
The highlight was a description of how, with babe in arms, she was in the audience at the Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus watching her husband receive his PhD in EECS several decades ago. Now today, that child is himself a PhD candidate in the same school where his father earned a PhD and his mother a BS in Computer Science. Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai have a younger son, as well, who is currently an undergraduate at Cal, also in the School of Engineering.
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Tags: IEDM, Marvell Technology Group, Pantas Sutardja, Sehat Sutardja, Sutardja Dai Hall, U.C. Berkeley, Weili Dai
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Tuesday, September 18th, 2012
Chris Rowen is Founder and CTO of Tensilica, an IP company based in Silicon Valley. We spoke last week by phone to discuss how an IP company decides what and when to introduce new products.
I first asked to Chris for a brief history of the RISC [Reduced Instruction Set Computing] architecture he is closely associated with, and how that history segued into the founding of Tensilica.
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From RISC to Tensilica …
Q: Can you give me a quick overview of the origins of RISC architecture?
 Chris Rowen: RISC is a set of ideas that grew up in academia and IBM in response to increased architectures in both the mainframe and microprocessor worlds.
People saw machines with really high hardware costs being built for assembly [language applications]. However, as compiler technology got better, people said: If I want a compiler to run well, I don’t need fancy instructions. I only need a common set of instructions that run really fast. All other complex operations could be composed by the compiler out of these fast, simple operations.
RISC grew out of these compiler technology advances, and a recognition in the VLSI era that there was an opportunity to rethink the process of how the architecture could be put together. (more…)
Tags: ARM, Chris Rowen, Dave Patterson, IBM, John Cocke, John Hennessy, MIPS Computer Systems, RISC, Silicon Graphics, Stanford, Synopsys, Tensilica, U.C. Berkeley
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