Qualcomm Arteris deal: high cost of differentiation

By SemiWiki

November 4, 2013

Is it really a surprise if Qualcomm, the undisputed leader of Application Processor (AP) and BaseBand (BB) IC for wireless mobile, already one of the Arteris investors (with ARM, Synopsys, Docomo Capital and a bunch of VC), eventually acquires the best NoC IP technology (the technology, the engineering team and the rights, but not the company) available on the market? At first I would say “no” and I will summarize the two years history of blogs written about Network-on-Chip benefits here is Semiwiki. Then, if I wonder that Arteris has NOT been acquired by another IP vendor (ARM or Synopsys are both part of Arteris board), I realize that this acquisition by one of Arteris’ customer may raise some questions…

As written in my last blog about Arteris, “NoC packetize and serialize transaction address, control, and data information on the same wires, which allows transactions to be sent over smaller numbers of wires while maintaining high quality of service (QoS) for each transmission”… Integrating a NoC in a SoC will help solving several types of problems, at first related to back-end chip design.

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