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Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a key technique for image recognition. As Wired Magazine put it a few years ago, “Google’s Artificial Brain Learns to Find Cat Videos.”

“Artificial Brain” may be going a bit far, but neural networks...

Setting the Release Preferences for your search results: The documents in the search results page often support multiple releases. You now have the option to set preferred release(s) for your default search on the home page search. Check out My Support – My Accounts and Preferences, Release Preferences. For example, you may set “IC 6.1.6” as the preferred release and ensure that…

As a lead design engineer on the Tensilica R&D team, Dr. Avinash Lingamneni certainly understands the trials and tribulations of developing always-on applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable, and wireless markets. His team develops Cadence’s Tensilica Fusion DSP. Over the summer, Avinash, who has a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University, discussed energy-efficient signal processing…

You have probably seen the Back to the Future trilogy. In Back to the Future II Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to a day in the future. When they made the movie in 1989, they picked a day 25 years out, unimaginably far into the future. But the exact...

In this week’s Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Jacek Duda talks about the components of the Cadence IP solution for USB Type-C, including USB Type-C port controller, multi-protocol PHY, DisplayPort transmitter, and Tensilica Xtensa DSP.

https://youtu.be/SBuh0KKRpvw

The MIPI CSI-2 (Camera Serial Interface) specification is celebrating its tenth birthday these days and the party is quite big with millions of mobile devices out there, passing every pixel from the camera sensor to the application processor through this interface.

The success of this protocol is due to a very robust architecture that enables high-speed traffic with low power consumption and cost-effective implementation…

The original USB connector seems to be the only connector where it is always the wrong way up. Everyone has had the experience of trying to insert a USB connector, finding it won't go, turning it over. It still won't insert. Turn it back to the first...

When I lived in England, newspapers had a tradition of not mentioning other newspapers by name, they would just say "in another newspaper." In that tradition, I sat down to lunch last week with Karen Bartleson of "another EDA company." She had recently...

Earlier in the year Avago announced that it was acquiring Broadcom for $37B (the merged company will lose the Avago name and the whole company will be Broadcom). This week an even bigger tech merger was announced: Dell announced...

The two obvious ways to implement a complex algorithm are to write a large amount of RTL and synthesize a specialized hardware block, or write a large amount of C and run it on a microprocessor.

The RTL approach has the potential for producing an optimal...

It was MemCon this week. Three keynotes, three parallel tracks each with four presentations. An exhibition. In one day you can soak up the state of the memory world by osmosis. Christine Young live-blogged the keynotes by Chris Rowen of Cadence's Tensilica...

This year's Jasper User Group conference finished up with a dose of realism in a panel session focused on the practicalities of bringing formal techniques into large companies with established flows. What do you tell your boss? How do you get skeptical...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Charles Qi takes a closer look at IP subsystems and how they can be used to build automotive applications.

https://youtu.be/7b-FAgZ7yJ4

The Allegro PCB Editor release has a few new capabilities related to symbol pins.

The Symbol Editor has been enhanced with a new utility designed to automatically renumber pins based on positional qualifiers. The path to the utility is ‘Layout – Renumber...

Rapid consumer product revolution continues to be enabled by semiconductor technology innovation. Driven by Moore’s Law, memory capacity increases, memory access rates, and single chip integration leads to new capabilities, merging of functionality, and increased battery life. Consumer products are fast followers of leading edge electronics such as smart phones and networking infrastructure. We consumers are cost-sensitive…

If you think power isn’t important then you must have been living under a rock for the last decade. But you could try asking Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, too.

You have probably heard by now, since you are presumably something to do with the semiconductor...

It is MemCon on Tuesday. I talked to David Lin to find out how it all started. He was employee #3 at Denali, the first non-engineer. He started as an AE and ended up as VP marketing. Denali was founded in 1995 as a sort of rogue EDA company in a niche...

TSMC and Samsung Both in iPhone 6s

It emerged that for the Apple iPhone 6s and 6s+, Apple decided to take a dual-source foundry approach with both Samsung and TSMC building the A9 application processor that powers it. Since these are different processes...

It was the Jasper User Group JUG this week. I first went to JUG several years ago when Jasper Design Automation was still an independent company and JUG was held in Cupertino. It was clear to me then that Jasper Gold was the best formal verification technology...

Each time I start working on an introductory paragraph for a new USB blog entry, I think about how big this interface standard has grown to be, and each time I’m amazed. Do you know that nowadays the annual estimate of USB-enabled device shipment is 3 billion? I mean nowadays, we are about to see the impact of all the new specs – USB Type-C, USB Alternate Modes, USB Power Delivery, and USB 3.1 Gen 2. Devices equipped…

7nm is already passé it seems! Today Cadence and imec announced the tapeout of the first 5nm test chip. Actually it is two chips. These use a combination of extreme ultra-violet (EUV) along with traditional 193nm immersion lithography (193i) with self...

Yes, it’s true. The Cadence gravitational field finally pulled me back and I am now blogging here at Cadence.com. I’m being thrown in at the deep end since Cadence has a big announcement with imec (see next post), it’s the Jasper User Group Conference...

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesday video, Dennis Crespo highlights the performance and power features of the new Tensilica Vision P5 DSP architecture for mobile, automotive, and security applications.

https://youtu.be/0Rg33B5dmO0

I blog from time to time about what’s new in Ethernet. I have just returned from the latest 802.3 meeting in Florida. IEEE 802.3 is the forum that maintains and updates Ethernet standards.

Here are some photos from Florida, I particularly like the one of the manatee I saw near the meeting hotel during a lunchtime walk:

There seems to be more activity going on in 802.3 than ever before with Ethernet…