Arteris Connected Blog

I've received a lot of feedback on the "Interchip Connectivity: HSIC, UniPro, HSI, C2C, LLI...oh my!" article I wrote last year and I thank everyone for their feedback!

The EE Times / EDN ACE Awards dinner last night was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with old friends and meet the engineers and business people behind this year's coolest electronics products. I feel honored that Arteris and our CEO, Charlie Janac, were chosen as finalists for the Innovator of the Year ACE Award and were recognized as being part of such an esteemed and accomplished group of people and organizations.

It may seem strange to link two interchip interface standards to the future of 3D integrated circuits, but please bear with me for a few minutes. I hope to prove that the learning from today will impact how we design SoCs in the near future.

Samsung’s announcement that it is investing a company-record $42B in 2012 for technology development came as a bit of a shock to many in the financial and technology press. The size of this investment dwarfs that of any other company I know of, and even exceeds the expected technology investments of entire nations, such as the combined investments of the Japanese semiconductor vendors.

Two new options for interchip connectivity are available today that enable sharing a DRAM memory between two chips for data and programs. These standards, called MIPI Low Latency Interface (MIPI LLI) and Chip-to-Chip (C2C), are primarily targeted at mobile phones, where a mobile phone’s modem usually requires its own discreet DRAM. With either C2C or MIPI LLI, the mobile phone modem can use the application processor’s DRAM though a low-latency, memory-mapped connection that requires no software drivers or runtime software.

“I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

This is how Steve Jobs answered his biographer when asked why he agreed to cooperate in the writing of his biography.

NOTE: Links to current versions of the OMAP4430, OMAP4460 and OMAP4470 TRMs are now at "OMAP4470 TRM Download Available".

Gartner analyst Jim Tully’s assessment that network on chip (NoC) technology will be “mainstream” in two to five years is an acknowledgement of the technical and commercial success NoC interconnect IP has had in the consumer electronics system on chip (SoC) market over the last couple of years.

For all the work our industry does to implement sophisticated power management and conservation features in our chips and software, I was dismayed (and a little appalled) to read Saturday’s New York Times article, “Atop TV Sets, a Power Drain That Runs Nonstop.”

Industry Product Lifecycles Affect Revenue Sensitivity to TTM

This is the second article in a series about how to calculate revenue losses due to delivering a product late to market. In this article I’ll compare the product lifespan and development cycle times of various industries and describe how sensitive product revenues are to product introduction times in these industries.