March 22, 2012
As featured in: Speed is the shiny object, the undisputed premium, and in many ways, the ultimate carrot with customers when designing advanced SoCs. There are a few moments when the conversation temporarily shifts to area, or some special feature, but we always come back to speed, or more specifically, frequency. This is without a …
February 23, 2012
As featured in: As I prepare to hit Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, I get the feeling that this will be a ‘do-over’ of last month’s CES, only without all the HD and 3D TVs. Although wireless infrastructure and applications are a big part of MWC, at the device level, tablets and smartphones will continue …
November 17, 2011
As featured in: One of the major advances in SoC design methodologies more than a decade ago was the decoupling of the network-on-chip (NoC) from the individual IP cores throughout the SoC. This was (and is) accomplished through the use of carefully specified sockets such as OCP, the old VSIA VCI and (somewhat later) AMBA-AXI, …
October 20, 2011
As featured in: Designers in the consumer electronics market—mobile in particular—are constantly looking for new ways to reduce cost and power while increasing performance. This is far from novel. With consumers’ unrelenting demand for more features at lower prices, you would think semiconductor companies would jump when confronted with a technology that gives them a …