Rich Wawrzyniak's blog

On Monday, February 7, 2022, Intel Foundry Services (IFS), made a series of major announcements regarding the RISC-V architecture and ecosystem:

What is the Real Promise of
Artificial Intelligence?
 
And Where Does BrainChip Fit into
 the Picture?
 
  
Past and Present Technological Innovations
 
Unquestionably, the introduction of augmented Artificial Intelligence (AI) into our economy and society is going to have profound effects on how we engage with the world around us and how we expect the world to engage with us. Many parallels can be drawn between today’s AI innovations and similar past periods in history. In each of these cases, the world experienced great leaps in innovation and invention,      which correspondingly produced great improvements in our daily lives.
 
Perhaps one of the most notable technological introductions was that of the mainframe computer for business and science applications back in the early 1950’s by IBM. This innovation led to the deployment of computing power to many companies throughout the world and allowed even small companies, through time-sharing arrangements, to have access to this capability. The 1950s and 1960s were decades where great leaps in productivity were made, enabled by this and other advancements.
 

Semico recently published an article in our March, 2021 IPI Newsletter detailing a press release between NaNose (Nano Artificial Nose) Medical and BrainChip in which they jointly announced a new system for medical diagnosis COVID-19. This system used an artificially intelligent nano-array based on molecularly modified gold nanoparticles and a random network of single-walled carbon nanotubes paired with the Akida neuromorphic AI processor from BrainChip.
 
Using a non-invasive breathalyzer approach, this system collects Volatile Organic Chemicals (VOC’s) given off by long list of diseases and passes these chemicals past the AI nano-array sensor and used the Akida neuromorphic processor to analyze the data, giving the results almost immediately with 86% accuracy.
 
Each of these technologies is projected to have great positive impacts on our society and economies in the near future. How much better then to detail the marriage of metamaterials and AI in this system as an impressive first step in that direction. In addition to the great achievement of being able to detect the COVID-19 virus non-invasively, this technology pairing can also detect a range of other diseases simultaneously with similar results.
 
The table below shows the other diseases that are detectable by the nano-array sensor and the BrainChip neuromorphic AI processor.
 
List of Diseases Detected by NaNose Medical Nano-array Sensor

On September 13, 2020, NVIDIA announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Arm Holdings from SoftBank for $40 billion in a combination of NVIDIA stock and cash. SoftBank will retain a 10% interest in Arm. While there are regulatory issues to be resolved in the UK, the US and China, NVIDIA anticipates this process will take 12 to 18 months. The process of integrating the two companies will not start until the deal is consummated.
 
The Basics of the Acquisition

On June 23^rd, 2020, Siemens AG signed a letter of intent to acquire Cambridge, UK-based 3^rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) vendor, UltraSoC. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed except to say Siemens plans to integrate UltraSoC’s technology into the Xcelerator portfolio as part of Mentor’s Tessent™ software product suite. The acquisition is expected to close in Siemens 4^th fiscal quarter this year.
 
There are several areas where this acquisition is impactful to the SIP market, the EDA market and the broader semiconductor market.
 
SIP Market Impacts:
 

This week, Facebook announced it had acquired Sonics, Inc., a 3^rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) vendor. Sonics is one of the mainstays of the SIP market for Interconnect SIP, which is used to tie together the multiple tens or hundreds of SIP blocks found on contemporary System-on-a-Chip (SoC) silicon solutions today. Sonics was founded in 1996 and was at the heart of the emerging SoC market in its early years along with ARC, ARM, MIPS, Analog Bits, Virage Logic and many others.
 
It is no surprise that a company like Facebook, who is designing their own AI-focused SoCs, would purchase a company like Sonics.  While no details of this acquisition have been released, some reasoned insights are possible. 
 
Implications for the Market
 
This acquisition removes a major player for Interconnect SIP from the market. Sonics’ customers must now determine how long Sonics will support them and at what level. It is reasonable to expect these customers will look to other suppliers for their interconnect requirements.
 

Interview with a Power Management Architect
 
by Richard Wawrzyniak: Principal Analyst; ASIC and SoC
Semico Research Corp.
 
Dynamic Power Management has become a 'must-have' in Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) design today because of tightening power budgets and rising transistor counts. These increases mainly stem from evolving market requirements for more device functionality and richer feature sets being made available to meet changing market requirements. The semiconductor industry has responded with a plethora of different solutions to these issues.
 
Semico Research Corp. conducted an interview with Jawad Haj-Yihia, a Power Management Architect formerly of Intel Corp. in Israel.
 
The following article represents key aspects of that interview delving into many of the issues that confront Power Management Architects in the industry today.
 
Market Requirements Drive Power and Energy Targets
 
Today, there is a constant evolution in market requirements for silicon solutions targeted at mobile applications. This is primarily driven by user demands for more functionality while delivering greater ease-of-use to the end user. All these advanced features and increased functionality come at a price; greater power consumption and rising device complexity.
 

(Originally published at semiengineering.com)

If there is one truism in the semiconductor market, it is that rising costs will impact unit demand at some point if they continue long enough. The subject of this blog deals not with device ASPs; but rather with rising SoC design costs, and their effect on the number of designs at the advanced nodes. Even though the mechanism governing each set of numbers is different (device ASPs vs. design costs), the overall impact can be similar. In this case, the number of design starts is impacted by the climate of rising design costs.

Following are a few of Semico’s findings.

I attended the Cadence CDNLive conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center on April 5 and 6, 2016 and had a chance to listen to four very thought provoking presentations given by the speakers. These presentations were combined to follow the keynote address given by Cadence CEO, Lip-Bu Tan and addressed several different aspects of the current semiconductor industry landscape.

Speakers
• Lip-Bu Tan, CEO, Cadence Design Systems
• Steve Mollenkoph, CEO, Qualcomm
• Sanjay Jha, CEO, GLOBALFOUNDRIES
• Tom Beckley, Sr. Vice President and General Manager, Custom IC & PCB Group

If there is one constant in our mobile, connected society today, it is the continual demand for moving more data, more efficiently and at less cost.  This dynamic underscores virtually every technology and end market. It is a trend that is proving to be critical to the semiconductor industry as well as companies like Facebook and Google that participate in the efforts to create the standards necessary to deploy 400G data channels for data centers.
 
The high speed channel initiative is aimed at the data center. It is a certainty the high targeted speeds will allow more data to be moved more quickly into edge devices and eventually smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices. While the transition to these speeds by devices is still in the future, there is market pressure to increase the data communication capabilities of the SoCs in mobile systems.