Smaller fabless chip vendors face an uphill battle: to beat out larger rivals, they must attract the attention of potential customers, prove the advantages of their products, and demonstrate that they will be reliable, long-term partners.  One such company recently used BDTI Benchmarks to accomplish all three of these objectives.

In 2004, ARM announced its newest generation of licensable cores, called the “Cortex” family.  Cortex cores span a wide range of performance levels, with Cortex M-series cores at the low end, Cortex R-series cores providing mid-range performance, and the Cortex A-series applications processors offering the highest performance.  The first Cortex core to be announced was the Cortex-M3, and since then ARM has announced several others, including the Cortex-A8 and A9, the Cortex-M1, and the Cortex-R4.

Avnera has released a set of application-specific standard product (ASSP) chips aimed at the audio market.  Avnera’s chips, implemented in CMOS, transmit and receive stereo audio (close to CD quality) over the 2.4 GHz wireless ISM band assigned internationally for industrial, scientific and medical uses.   Avnera claims a typical range of 45 feet, with longer range if an optional external power amplifier is used.

Do you ever look at a piece of hardware and wonder, “Why, oh why, did they build it like that?”  This is what I’m thinking as I look at my 2001 Volkswagen Passat, a car that is now completely dysfunctional because of an unfortunate (yet easily foreseen) intersection of water and electronic circuitry.  Let me explain.

The best way to ensure that a presentation is effective is to test it with a knowledgeable, critical, and responsive audience. A test audience can also help ensure that the content is correct, relevant, and appropriate for the intended audience. Just as important, a test audience can help presenters gauge the clarity, appeal, and impact of their pitch. After all, superb technical content serves no purpose if the audience loses interest a few minutes into the presentation.

When I was a kid, 10,000 lines of code was considered a decent-sized application. Now, it seems, we’re on the verge of seeing applications with 10,000 threads. Or at least, that’s what graphics chip maker Nvidia is envisioning. Nvidia recently announced the Tesla product family, which includes a chip with 128 processors and hardware support for execution of thousands of threads.

As multimedia systems grow in complexity, system and SoC developers are increasingly relying on vendors to provide “solutions”—combinations of hardware and software that implement complete multimedia functions such as audio and video compression and decompression.  Vendors have responded by offering a growing number of such solutions.