Mobile World Congress: A Decade of Change in IP Innovation

4 Mar 2015 • 1 minute read

BARCELONA, Spain—In the past decade, immense change has come to mobile electronic system design. Steve Roddy should know. He’s had a ringside seat to those changes—and Mobile World Congress—for years.

Roddy, senior group director for Tensilica marketing, said during MWC 2015 that system design is a much different challenge than it was a decade ago. (Tensilica, which Cadence acquired in 2013, has exhibited at big events like MWC and Consumer Electronics Show for years).

Roddy said:

“People came from a world where 10 years ago, SoC design was a couple of fixed processors, all the innovation—all the logic—was done in hardwired implementation in the SoC. Over the course of that decade, systems have gotten a lot more complex, people have more demanding applications, there’s more software content, there’s more uncertainty about where people want to build their particular system. People are trying to build smarter devices, but they can’t predict a year from now or two years from now what exactly those applications are going to look like. So they want to put very energy efficient, very optimized systems in silicon, but they also want to have flexibility.”

From the Cadence booth at MWC 2015 I chatted with Roddy about this evolution, today’s major system design pain points and what he foresees in emerging application areas such as IoT and automotive:

Brian Fuller