SAN FRANCISCO--Design Automation Conference 2014, more than ever, was about SoC design challenges and solutions, IoT, automotive, embedded market opportunities and how they electronics ecosystem is joining…
Sometimes Hardware Details Matter in ARM Embedded Systems Programming
Last week, I received the call for papers for the Embedded World Conference for 2015. The list of topics is a good reminder of how broad the world of embedded systems is. It also reminded me how overloaded…
Wrapping up the ARM Step Challenge with a Video Review
SAN FRANCISCO--We've written a lot about the really fun, really clever ARM Step Challenge at DAC 2014. From the initial The ARM Step Challenge at DAC: Throwing Down the Gauntlet post to The Aftermath…
Software’s Growing Role in Semiconductor Ecosystems
Two very different analysts stress the importance of software in chip and server ecosystems. Last week, veteran semiconductor electronic design automation (eda) analyst garysmith made the following ob…
DAC Breakfast: 14nm is Real and Ready for Use
My DAC started early last Monday morning with a delicious breakfast and a lively discussion with robaitken of ARM, Kelvin Low of Samsung Electronics, Glenn Dukes of Synopsys and skillfully moderated by…
The ARM Step Challenge at DAC: Throwing Down the Gauntlet
I didn't get a chance to participate in the ARM Community Step Challenge at Mobile World Congress, alas. ( ARM Step Challenge: “Who is the ‘hardest working’ at MWC?”) But I…
ARM-Xilinx SoC Lab-in-a-Box One-day Workshop
The University Programs of ARM® and Xilinx® recently collaborated to produce an ARM-Xilinx SoC Lab-in-a-Box One-day Workshop based on the freely accessible ARM Cortex®-M0 DesignStart™ Processor…
CoreLink NIC-400: a great interconnect for wearables and entry-level smartphones
As the number of processors and I/O masters in an SoC continues to rise the need for an efficient and easy to design interconnect becomes critical. An interconnect must provide sufficient throughput and…
SMP Linux on a Minimal Dual-Core ARM Cortex-A15 System
Previously, I explained how to create a minimal, single-core ARM® Cortex™-A15 system running Linux®. In this article I will update the hardware design to use a dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and run SMP…
Cycle Accurate ARM Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57 Models Support AArch64
We (The specified item was not found.) have just completed our first major release of 2014. It includes significant new content and many bug fixes to all products. Today, I would like to highlight the…
Running the Latest Linux Kernel on a Minimal ARM Cortex-A15 System
Linux® has become a popular operating system in embedded products, and as a result is experiencing increased usage for system design and verification. This means that a new set of people, who are not traditional…
First tape-out with TSMC’s 16nm FinFET and ARM’s 64-bit big.LITTLE Processors
Another important milestone was reached recently for TSMC and ARM when the teams taped out at the end of December 2013 (see block diagram) the first 64 bit ARMv8 processors in a big.LITTLE configuration…
Musings about Moore's Law and future technology
Photo modified by Greg Yeric from original by Eric Fischer. I was recently invited to add some thoughts on technology scaling over at Ed Sperling's excellent semien…
FinFET production and the ARM Ecosystem: TSMC readies 16nm FinFET ramp and tips 10nm FinFET plans
Now that CES is done for another year, it is worth remembering that the diversity of solutions on display and the proliferation of new device experiences at ever lower costs is due to semiconductor vendors…
Unified Virtual Prototypes: Fast and Accurate?
Over the last five years, one of the concerning things about virtual prototyping has been the separation between speed and accuracy. The lack of any meaningful connections between models built for speed…
Introduction to the QVN Protocol
I created a short introduction to the QVN protocol used with the QVN-400 plugin to NIC-400 and with the DMC-400 dynamic memory controller. This is a non-confidential introductory-level document for those…
Getting Up and Running with the ARM Mali-450 MP GPU (Part 3 of 3)
Below is a blog post which Varun Subramanian made to Carbon's blog today about using ARM Fast Models together with a Carbonized Mali-450MPIn the previous parts of this blog series, I discussed the…
How to Measure and Optimize the System Performance of a Smartphone RTL Design - Part 4
Part 4 in a four part blog describes a more systematic approach to measuring and validating the system performance of these types of systems and introduces new tools to make this systematic approach practically…
Getting the Most Out of the ARM CoreLink NIC-400
At this year's ARM® TechCon™, Carbon Design Systems did a joint presentation with ARM entitled "Getting the Most out of the ARM CoreLink™ NIC-400." In this blog, I'll give a high level overview of what…
How to Measure and Optimize the System Performance of a Smartphone RTL Design - Part 3
Part 3 in a four part blog describes a more systematic approach to measuring and validating the system performance of these types of systems and introduces new tools to make this systematic approach practically…