April 30, 2013
Sonics licenses interconnect patent portfolio to ARM® and expands companies’ cooperation on advanced power management and interconnect technology Milpitas, Calif. – April 30, 2013 – Sonics Inc., the leader of system IP for cloud-scale systems-on-chip (SoC), today announced that ARM has licensed Sonics patent portfolio currently consisting of 138 properties for use in ARM products …
December 20, 2012
The worldwide semiconductor market is finishing a tough year with IHS iSuppli forecasting 2012 at $303B down 2.3% from 2011. At first blush this is not very exciting, but just take a moment and think about the increasing capabilities of the chips shipping in 2012 due to Moore’s law advancing capabilities across all semiconductors. Mobile devices like smart phones, media tablets and mobile PCs are driving semiconductor innovation and revenues. But these devices are just the visible part of the iceberg.
December 19, 2012
SoC design continues to challenge semiconductor and system companies in their pursuit to create a better user experience for a wide range of products. Given this, I was pleasantly surprised to see that two of the “Ten technologies that will change the world in 2013,” according to EETimes (December 2012 issue) were SoC-related.
September 27, 2012
Now that the iPhone 5 hype is quieting down, the discussion has turned to the A6 chip that is powering this must-have device. There is much speculation on what is inside the A6 processor. Is it a dual-core A15 or a custom architecture? Is it a ‘big.LITTLE’ architecture? What speed are cores running at—1.2GHz? Others argue that the graphics processor is of equal importance to the CPU for the overall user experience. In any case, Apple is boasting a 2x performance improvement over the previous generation iPhone.
This discussion, as expected, has expanded to rival CPUs like Qualcomm’s custom Krait core, used in Snapdragon, or Intel’s Atom processor. With all the talk of the processor performance (CPU and GPU), I found it interesting that there was only one brief reference to the memory architecture of the A6. At MemCon last week during the keynote presentation by Martin Lund, senior vice president at Cadence, mentioned the importance of ‘compute, interconnect and storage.’ He then continued on to discuss the time and energy engineering teams spend optimizing the memory interface to minimize latency. Of course at a memory conference we expect the focus to be on the memory, but the point is well taken. The CPU is only one part of the equation.