Tensilica, Design, and Verification IP Blogs

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...

The JEDEC UFS (Universal Flash Storage) started in 2011 with the v1.0 first specification version, supporting a bandwidth of 300 MB/s per lane. Since then JEDEC has been continuously releasing new UFS specification versions on top of the MIPI UniPro® and MIPI MPHY® evolving specs. UFS is now evolving to a new version of 3.0, reaching a total bandwidth of 2.4 GB/s. It seems that UFS keeps on slowly winning over eMMC in...

Cache coherency is not a new concept. Coherent architectures have existed for many generations of CPU and Interconnect designs. Verifying adherence to coherency rules in SoCs has always been one of the most complex challenges faced by verification engineers. Over the years, it became even more challenging with increasing number of cores in CPU clusters and introduction of the embedded L3 (level 3) cache to the coherent...

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...

If you missed Michelle Mao’s presentation at the recent Autosens conference in Detroit, “What Will It Take to Bring DNN to Embedded?”, you missed an important evaluation of how designers can do four fundamental things to lower the power budget and bring deep neural networks (DNNs) to embedded systems: Optimize the network architecture Optimize the problem definition Minimize the number of bits per computation...

In coordination with the announcement of the new ARM® AMBA® 5 Coherent Hub Interface Issue B, Cadence is announcing the availability of its AMBA 5 CHI Issue B Verification IP (VIP) to address the complexity challenges of enterprise SoC development for...

Have you tried a product incorporating the new USB Type-C port? Do you wonder how well it works? I recently bought a new laptop and monitor that support this interface. In fact, Type-C is the only port on those devices. Image courtesy Austin Event Photography I’ve been looking forward to the promise of a single, all-encompassing port ever since I wrote Why USB 3.0 Will Drive SoC Verification back in 2013. Well...

Remember automobiles from a few years ago? They were pretty simple machines with lots of small microprocessors distributed across the whole vehicle and doing fairly simple tasks. Semiconductors have been in automobiles for several years, of course, with simple 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers performing functions like Anti-lock Braking (ABS). But today’s automobiles are a different beast. They incorporate several compute...

You might have seen the graph below about the increase in monthly internet traffic around the world. Ever wondered what was causing it? If you think all that traffic is simply due to people binge-watching House of Cards on Netflix, or uploading the...

We all know the futuristic vision of the world just around the corner. The vision where we tell our smart home that we’ve just left work at the end of a long day, and we’re heading home. Our home then tells the thermostat to warm up or cool down, lights to turn on, and the oven to start baking the lasagna we left in it that morning. We arrive to a warm, brightly lit home, and hot, freshly cooked food. You’ve got the...

Do you remember what life was like before the internet and smart phones? If you wanted to find information about something, you had to go to the library and find a book that could answer your question, which usually meant a delay of anything from a few hours to several days. Then the internet happened, and the world as we know it changed forever. Smart phones came along, and brought with them a new kind of freedom and...

With cloud technology going vertical, everything is changing. The world is connected like never before—managing and processing large amount of data, every single second. Augmented/Virtual Reality is the latest game changer, even in its early stage of development and proliferation. The gathering of semiconductor experts at CDNLive Israel confirmed these and other trends are impacting everything from IP to tools to business...

Ethernet was developed in the 1970s and has been a viable communications protocol for over 40 years. Ethernet was initially used to connect computer systems and peripherals in a local area network (LAN) but quickly evolved to be the protocol of choice for wide area networks (WANs) and of course, the internet. It’s been constantly reinvented, with new capabilities, more security, and faster speeds over the years to keep...