EDAgraffiti Paul McLellan with a foreword by Jim Hogan

Chapter 1: Semiconductor Industry – Explains all sorts of facets about the industry ranging from the costs involved in creating and running a fab, to various forms of IP like ARM, Atom, and PowerPC processors and cores, to what’s happening with the semiconductor industry in Japan.

Chapter 2: EDA Industry – Presents many interesting points of view, starting with why EDA (which is predominantly a software-based industry) has a hardware business model. Then bounces around looking at things like the corporate CAD cycle, Verilog and VHDL, Design for Manufacturing, ESL, the EDA press, and where EDA is going in the next ten years.

Chapter 3: Silicon Valley – Considers visas, green cards, China, India, Patents, and the Upturns and Downturns in the valley.

Chapter 4: Management – Being a CEO, hiring and firing in startups, emotional engineers, strategic errors, acquisitions, interview questions, managing your boss, how long should you stay in a job, and much more.

Chapter 5: Sales – Semi equipment and DDA, hunters and farmers, $2M per sales person, channel choices, channel costs for an EDA startup, application engineers, customer support, running a sales force, and much more.

Chapter 6: Marketing – Why Intel only needs one copy, the arrogance of ESL, standards and old standards, pricing, competing with free EDA software, don’t listen to your customers, swiffering new EDA tools, creating demand in EDA, licensed to bill, barriers to entry, the second mouse gets the cheese, and much more.

Chapter 7: Presentations – The art of presentations, presentations without bullets, all-purpose EDA keynote, finger in the nose, it’s like football only with bondage, and much more.

Chapter 8: Engineering – Where is all the open source software, why is EDA so buggy, internal deployment, groundhog day, power is the new timing, multicore, process variation, CDMA tales, SaaS for EDA, and much more.

Chapter 9: Investment and Venture Capital – Venture capital for your grandmother, crushing fixed costs, technology of SOX, FPGA software, Wall Street values, royalties, why are VCs so greedy, the anti-portfolio, CEO pay, early exits, and much more

EDAgraffiti Paul McLellan with a foreword by Jim Hogan - Click here

How to Make Smartphone Even Smarter?

The IT industry marvels like augmented reality and artificial intelligence, which marked technological utopianism in the science fiction movies during the 1970s and 1980s, are here now, enabled by a machine-learning technique called deep learning.

Deep learning algorithms—which date back to the 1980s—are now driving Google Now speech recognition, face recognition service on Facebook, and instant language translation on Skype. However, the companies like Facebook and Microsoft are using GPUs to run these algorithms, and they could move to FPGAs in a bid to acquire even more processing speed.

Not surprisingly, therefore, these cutting-edge technology services consume an enormous amount of processing power, which is handily available at the large data centers that these companies have. Now mobile is the next frontier where deep learning can bring unprecedented gains by processing sensor data available from smartphones and tablets and perform tasks like speech and object recognition.

A virtual brain on the phone

And that will inevitably require moving some of the processing power to personal devices like smartphones, tablets and smartwatches. On the other hand, traditional mobile hardware made up of CPU and GPU is computationally constrained due to large processing overhead required to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms.

Smartphone's New Smarts

So a new breed of processors is now emerging to bring these services at a much lower power to smartphones and wearable devices. Take CEVA-XM4, for instance, an imaging and computer vision processor IP that allows chips to see by running a deep-learning network trained to recognize gestures, faces and even emotions.

The CEVA-XM4 image processing core takes advantage of pixel overlap by reusing same data to produce multiple outputs. That increases processing capability and reduces power consumption; moreover, it saves external memory bandwidth and frees system buses for other tasks.

It's an intelligent vision processor for cameras, image registration, depth map generation, point cloud processing, 3D scanning and more. The CEVA-XM4 combines depth generation with vision processing and supports applications processing in multiple areas like gesture detection and eye-tracking.

Face recognition: CNN usage flow with Caffe training network

Socionext, a Japanese developer of SoC solutions, is using CEVA's imaging and vision DSP core to power its Milbeaut image processing chip for digital SLR, surveillance, drones and other camera-enabled devices. The first chipset of the Milbeaut image processor family—MB86S27—employs imaging DSP core's powerful vector processing engine and is aimed at next-generation camera applications such as augmented reality and video analytics.

CNN/DNN Deployment Framework

The task of building support for deep learning into chips for smartphones and tablets also requires a new breed of software tools for accelerating deep learning application deployment. And the company supplying XM4 vision processor has acknowledged this by launching the CEVA Deep Neural Network (CDNN), a software framework that provides real-time object recognition and vision analytics to harness the power of imaging DSP core.

CEVA claims that its deep neural network framework for XM4 image processor enables deep learning functions three times faster than the leading GPU-based solutions. Moreover, CDNN enables XM4 vision processor to consume 30x less power while requiring 15x less memory bandwidth. Case in point: a pedestrian detection algorithm running DNN on a 28nm chip requires less than 30mW for a 1080p video stream operating at 30fps.

It's worth noting that deep learning works in two stages. First, companies train a neural network to perform a specific task. Second, another neural network carries out the actual task. Here, CDNN toolset boasts CEVA Network Generator, an automated technology that enables real-time classification with pre-trained networks and automatically converts them into real-time network model.

Real-time CDNN application flow for face recognition

Phi Algorithm Solutions, a supplier of machine learning solutions, has optimized its CNN-based "unique object detection network" algorithm using the CDNN framework alongside CEVA-XM4 vision DSP core. The Toronto, Canada–based firm has been able to make a quick and smooth shift from offline training to real-time detection. Now the company's optimized algorithms are available for applications such as pedestrian detection and face detection.

The CDNN software framework supports complete CNN implementation as well as in specific layers. And it supports various training networks like Caffe, Torch and Theano. Moreover, CDNN includes real-time example models for object and scene recognition, ADAS, artificial intelligence, video analytics, augmented reality, virtual reality and similar computer vision applications.

The availability of intelligent vision processors like CEVA-XM4 and toolsets such as CDNN is a testament that deep learning is no longer an exclusive domain of large, powerful computers. The dramatic advances in deep learning have reached the smartphone doorstep, and smartphone is going to get smarter. The smartphone is now powerful enough to run deep learning.

Do 8 Cores Really Matter in Smartphones?

As the smartphone industry has begun to mature, one-upmanship among smartphone manufacturers and SoC vendors has bred a dangerous trend: ever-increasing processor core counts and the association between increased CPU core count and greater performance. This association originated as SoC vendors and OEMs have tried to find ways to differentiate themselves from one another through core counts. Some vendors are creating confusion, as phones today have core counts from 2 up to 8 and vary wildly in performance and, even more importantly, experience. One reason for this confusion is many users and reviewers have used inappropriate benchmarks to illustrate smartphone user experience and real world performance. As a result, we believe that some consumers are misled in their buying decisions and may end up with the wrong device and the wrong experience.

The 8 Core Myth...
The 8 Core Myth, also known as the Octacore Myth, is the perception that more CPU cores are better and having more cores means higher performance. Today’s smartphones range from 2 cores up to 8 cores, even though performance and user experience are not a function of CPU core count. The myth, however, will not be limited to 8 cores, as there are plans for SoCs with up to 10 cores, and we could even see more in the future.

Not All Cores Are the Same...
In some phones, users are getting Octacore designs with up to 8 ARM Cortex-A53 cores. These 8 cores perform differently than 4 ARM Cortex-A57 cores paired with 4 ARM Cortex-A53 cores in what is called a big.LITTLE configuration. Core designs vary wildly from ARM’s own A53 and A57 64-bit CPUs to Intel’s x86 Atom 4-core processors to Apple’s 2-core A8 ARM processor. All these processors are designed differently and behave differently across application workloads and operating systems. Some cores are specifically designed for high performance, some for low power. Others are designed to balance the two through dynamic clocking and higher IPC (instructions per clock). As a result, no two SoCs necessarily perform the same when you take clock speed and core count into account.

Through the different benchmarks, tools, and applications, we showed that CPU core count in a modern smartphone is not an accurate measurement of performance or experience. More CPU cores are not always better. We do acknowledge that having many smaller cores is one way to simplify power management, but these tests are not focused on power; they are focused on performance and user experience.

CPU core counts are not the way that phone manufacturers or carriers should be promoting their devices. CPU core count is only one factor in Android when the SoC has fewer than 4 cores. The marketing of core counts as a primary driver of performance and experience must end and be replaced with improved benchmarking practices and education