Ron Wilson

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Does Agile Development make sense for SoC design?

One of the great debates of the last ten years in the software world has been the question of Agile Development. Given the growing role of software in an SoC project, it seems fair to ask if Agile techniques could-or should-be applied to the enormous OS porting, driver development, middleware integration, and application development projects that now envelop most SoC designs. For that matter,... More

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Apache is part of Ansys: now what?

The August 1 completion of the acquisition of Apache Design Solutions by physical-modeling vendor Ansys brought a sudden end to a quick and surprising sequence of events. It also raised some fascination questions, not the least for Apache’s existing customers. A brief recap might help. In mid-March, Apache registered its intent to make an Initial Public Offering. The idea of a... More

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Thinking straight through economic turmoil

Stock market sell-offs. Bond rating downgrades. Turmoil in Europe. Does all this mean anything for chip designers? Empowered by the certainty of being wrong when projecting the future, let’s explore that question. First, we should separate symptoms from processes. The financial headlines mentioned above are symptoms. They are the public manifestations of the world’s enormous... More

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Orca shows a full dual-mode Bluetooth core in CMOS

The market trajectory of Bluetooth shows the value of perseverance. From a premature launch resulting in something remarkably similar to abject failure, Bluetooth became the unquestioned standard for people who wanted to wear a low-gain microwave oven next to their skulls, recharge the thing every night, and say “sorry, what was that?” a lot. From such humble success the standard... More

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CAST announces royalty-free BA22 32-bit RISC IP

There are designs in which you need a CPU core, but not an ARM core. The issue may simply be avoiding royalties, or export restrictions, or complying with a corporate policy. Or it may be that you are trying to hit a speed-area-power point that is a stretch for ARM’s current products, and you don’t want to invest in an expert in processor-core optimization. This situation can... More