EDA and IP

EnSilica, the custom ASIC design and supply services specialist, has won a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to build a chip for low-cost satellite broadband from anywhere on the planet when 4G/5G isn’t available. Specifically, it will support broadband connections for moving vehicles and Internet access for unconnected places, whether remote rural locations or disaster zones. The company ...

Rebecca Dobson is corporate vice-president, EMEA, Cadence Design Systems, following a career in sales with two UK semiconductor companies. She tells Caroline Hayes about her route into electronics and how she led staff through the pandemic. Rebecca Dobson studied for a BsC in business information technology. “I was good at chemistry, so I chose something that gave me options,” she ...

Cadence Design Systems has announced LPDDR5X memory interface intellectual property designed to operate at 8,533Mbit/s, claiming it to be the first. Based on its LPDDR5 and GDDR6 products, the IP has a PHY and a controller, designed to follow the JEDEC JESD209-5B standard. The controller-PHY interface is based on the latest DFI 5.1 specification, and a variety of on-chip buses ...

Imagination Technologies is aiming at phone-based gaming with scalable GPU intellectual property that can implement hardware ray-tracing. Called IMG DXT, and part of a planned ‘D-Series’ family, the GPUs “offers mobile device manufacturers the chance to integrate ray tracing into their SoCs, to match their design goals from premium to mainstream devices”, according to the company. The GPU scales from ...

Axivion has added checks for MISRA C++ 202x rules with the release of its Axivion Suite 7.5 code analysis tools. “Especially when developing safety-critical embedded systems, compliance with the latest coding standards is a must to ensure code quality throughout the whole development process,” according to the company. “Now Axivion Suite 7.5 safeguards compliance with several new MISRA C++ 202x ...

Digi-Key Electronics has announced that it will match donations made to KiCad, the open-source software EDA suite for Electronic Design Automation. The offer runs from 1-7 December up to a value of $15,000. According to its creators, the goal of KiCad is to provide “the best possible cross-platform electronics design application for professional electronics designers”. It’s aim is to hide ...

Xiphera has announced intellectual property cores for implementing hardware post-quantum cryptography security on FPGAs and asics. Such security is executed on classical computing platforms to protect against quantum computing based attacks. Branded ‘xQlave’, the IP blocks are aimed at quantum-secure key exchange and digital signatures. “Powerful enough quantum computers will be able to break current public-key asymmetric cryptosystems based on ...

Risk-V intellectual property company Andes Technology has certified simulation reference models from Imperas reference for use evaluating multi-core designs featuring the functional-safety-optimised AndesCore N25F-SE. At the same time, it also certified the complete range of Andes processor IP blocks with ‘Andes Custom Extension’ (ACE) support. Such virtual references run exactly the same binary code as any resulting hardware would. “Functional ...

SiFive has announced two high-performance RISC-V processing cores. “P670 and P470 are specifically designed for the most demanding workloads for wearables and other advanced consumer applications,” said SiFive v-p Chris Jones. “We have optimised these RISC-V Vector-enabled products to deliver performance and efficiency improvements and we are in evaluations with a number of top-tier customers.” Both are also available in ...

London embedded systems design and test house Bermondsey Electronics has launched what it describes as an “integration verification engine” that automates the operation of networkable instrumentation to exercise a device-under-test (DUT) and verify that its hardware and software are functioning together as intended. Called Believe, and based on JavaScript, it “can also be used for continuous integration and end-of-line quality ...