Tensilica and Design IP Blogs

Since 2013, we have seen the HBM specifications being released by JEDEC and companies announcing in the same month HBM products just like magic. How can these companies have a silicon-proven product altogether with newly announced official specifications? What is the secret process they use in order to be constantly first-in-market with these new technologies? And more important, what can YOU do in order to also be such...

PCI-SIG DevCon 2019 APAC tour has come to Tokyo and Taipei this year. The focus is predominantly around the latest updates for PCIe Gen 5 which its version 1.0 specification was just released this year in May. A series of presentations provided by PCI-SIG on the day 1 with comprehensive information covering all aspects of Gen 5 specification, including protocol, logical, electrical, compliance updates. On the day 2 ...

The PCI-SIG finalized the PCIe 4.0 specification with doubling the data to 16GT/s from 8GT/s in PCIe 3.0 in 2017. Products implementing this technology have begun to hit the market in 2019. Earlier this year, AMD announced it X570 chipset would support the PCIe 4.0 interface and Phison also introduced the world’s first PCIe 4.0 SSD. With the increasing companies are working on PCIe 4.0 related product development, Cadence...

PCIe has been widely adopted in the electronics industry since its first debut in 2003 (PCIe 1.0 standard release) for wide breach of applications, from Data Center Server, Networking, to Mobile, AI/ML, Automotive, IoT, and many others…. It’s a versatile, high-performance, robust, mature interconnect standard with full “backward compatibility” (e.g., a PCIe 3.0 device can still function well in a PCIe 4.0 system) which...

Test chips are becoming more widespread and more complex at advanced process nodes as design teams utilize early silicon to diagnose problems prior to production. But this approach also is spurring questions about whether this approach is viable at 7nm and 5nm, due to the rising cost of prototyping advanced technology, such as mask tooling and wafer costs. Semiconductor designers have long been making test chips to...

Modern systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) continue to increase in complexity, adding more components and calculation power to accommodate new performance-hungry applications such as machine learning and autonomous driving. With increased number of SoC components, such as CPUs, GPUs, accelerators and I/O devices, comes increased demand to correctly model interoperability of various components. Traditional simulation of complex...

Differentiating good IP from mediocre or bad IP is getting more difficult, in part because it depends upon how and where it is used and in part, because even the best IP may work better in one system than another—even in chips developed by the same vendor. So, how do you measure IP quality and why it is so complicated? The answer depends on who is asking. Most of the time, the definition of IP quality depends on...

With Moore’s Law, the industry assumes that when you go from one geometry to the next finer node, you will have performance gains. All this is automatic. Chip designers have tried to leverage improvements in process technology to get performance improvements for many years now. Let’s examine whether or not this assumption is still valid. When we were at more mature technologies, such as 90nm to 65nm, there may have...

Trust. Privacy. Confidentiality. These are three important concerns for designers of IoT edge devices. Today NXP announced that they are addressing these concerns with two new platforms that feature secure execution environment (SEE) to give developers access to “unprecedented” security capabilities. These platforms provide a multi-layered, hardware-enabled protection scheme to secure IoT edge devices and cloud-to...

Did you make it to MWC Shanghai? I didn’t, but I read about what was hot – narrowband (NB) IoT. Three of Cadence’s customers had Tensilica Fusion F1 DSP demos on the show floor. Xinyi Information Technology, a China-based company, showed off the first single-core modem that integrates a CMOS power amplifier with the modem. Their Marconi X1 modem features an NB-IoT protocol stack from Huachang Technology, who was able...

I was asked the following question recently. No longer are we seeing increasing amounts of functionality being crammed into chips, except under very special circumstances. Chips today are trending towards the leaner side. Is this only when power is a primary concern? Does this apply to all technology nodes or only to larger ones? What about pins – I/O has often been the limiter. What impact will this have on IP? Will...

At the Cadence booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we’re featuring a demo of a software-based GPS receiver from Galileo Satellite Navigation running off a Cadence Tensilica Fusion F1 DSP. It’s a very impressive demo—come by...

What is a software GPS, what does it have to do with Tensilica DSP IP, and why would anyone care? To answer that, let's start with a quiz from the transportation industry. How many shipping containers are currently in transit around the world? It turns out that no one knows for sure, but the best guess is that there are about 20 million containers in service today. And it's a safe bet that those containers are carrying...

As discussed in the previous installment of this blog, a new class of atomic transactions was introduced in the AMBA® 5 ACE/AXI specification to make operations at the remote locations more streamlined and efficient. We have considered an example of AtomicStore transaction with ADD operation and discussed why it was more efficient than relying on the older semaphore-like exclusive operations. In this installment of the...

I’ve been going to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for over 10 years, and it never fails to amaze me. This year’s theme is “Creating a Better Future” and I can’t think of a better theme for Cadence – our Tensili...

While attending the recent DesignCon show for the first time, I was struck by the many displays of cables, connectors, boards, and various kinds of test equipment (you can read about the impact this had on me in my previous post, A Walk Through DesignCon Turns Into a Long Journey ). There was so much hardware, in fact, that I felt like I was walking through a giant Fry’s store. The impression was so strong that my first...

Have you ever attended the DesignCon show? I attended the recent event for the first time and was surprised by what I saw: tons of high-bandwidth coax cables, circuit boards, connectors, and other hardware—all harnessed to very expensive scopes and channel analyzers displaying perfect eye diagrams. This was definitely a show for hardware engineers. Walking around the show floor brought on an unexpected feeling...

The recent update of the AMBA® 5 ACE/AXI specification introduces a number of significant performance improvements which help to align the protocol to the more recent AMBA® 5 CHI (Coherent Hub Interface) specification. One of the most prominent features is introduction of atomic transactions. Before we take a close look at this new class of transactions, let’s look back in time. Previous generations of AMBA ACE/AXI...

I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't heard it myself on a laptop in the Cadence booth at the Consumer Electronics Show ( CES) this year. Through a great innovation by our partner Dolby, you can now get surround sound on your laptop! You’ve probably been in a movie theater with Dolby’s latest innovation— Dolby Atmos . And maybe you’ve purchased a television in the last year with Dolby Atmos (it was a huge sensation at...

Want to see the exciting technology that is behind some of the biggest innovations at CES? Book a meeting now to visit the Cadence invitation-only suites at CES 2018, January 9-12, South Hall 2, Suite MP2577 (same location as last year). See Tensilic...

It’s only a week before the first event of USB Developer Days , a series of meetings for USB developers, where the USB 3.2 specification will be formally announced. Much like with any recent smartphone announcement, we know pretty much everything about the new standard before it’s formally announced. We know that the big news is the 20Gbps support, twice the performance of the previous (USB 3.1 Gen 2) standard, which...

If you’re designing chips for in-vehicle infotainment, in-cabin electronics, vision systems, digital noise reduction, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), look at Cadence for the key IP to speed your design effort. We just announced that we have collaborated with a major foundry to produce an IP portfolio that’s ASIL-B ready and ASIL-C/D capable. See the press release for full details. Cadence IP is area...

PCI-SIG Developer’s Conference 2017 was held in Santa Clara, California in June this year where several hundred customers from more than a hundred unique companies visited the conference. The next-generation PCI Express (PCIe) 5.0 specification was announced with plans for ratification in 2019. The announcement had a supporting quote by Cadence confirming our long-term commitment to developing products for PCIe interface...

Here’s an experiment to try: in a quiet (but crowded) Auditorium, drop a stack of plates. Hypothesis: At the first splinters of the crash, all eyes will jerk to the source of the sound. You probably won’t get many people listening harder to find out what happened. Yes, our hearing can give us a lot of information, too—it can indicate direction, distance, magnitude, and even give some ideas about what happened ...

Yes, it’s Tensilica’s birthday! Twenty years ago today, on July 31, 1997, Tensilica was officially incorporated by Chris Rowen, who I knew from our Synopsys days when he was VP of the Design Reuse Business Unit. I started working with Tensilica (as a PR consultant) when there were eight people in the office next to the Duke of Edinburgh pub on Wolfe road in Cupertino. I became a Tensilica employee in 2002, and worked...