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SUMMARY:Reigniting Innovation in the Hardware Industry - Krste Asanovic - 
 UC Berkeley
DTSTART:20170531T151500Z
DTEND:20170531T161500Z
UID:TALK71866@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:David Greaves
DESCRIPTION:\nThe hardware industry has experienced one of the largest eve
 r waves of\ncorporate consolidations in the last few years.  Now only a fe
 w large\ncompanies are left that can design complex chips in advanced\ntec
 hnology nodes fabricated by one of only four major semiconductor\nmanufact
 urers.  Innovation is very difficult in this risk-averse\nenvironment.  Ha
 rdware startups are almost non-existent\, and the big\ncompanies appear to
  have run out of ideas beyond cost cutting through\nmergers.\n\nTragically
 \, the hardware industry's death spiral comes just at the\npoint where app
 lications ranging from IoT to the cloud are demanding\ninnovative customiz
 ed hardware to enable new system capabilities.  The\ntraditional semicondu
 ctor business model cannot support thousands of\nstartups developing custo
 m chips\, and startups cannot afford the cost\,\ndelay\, and risk required
  to build chips in the traditional way.\n\nMoore's Law's demise is largely
  irrelevant to the problems in the\nhardware industry\, as except for a fe
 w high-volume products\, cost per\ntransistor is insignificant compared to
  upfront design costs.\nReducing design time and cost are the key to reign
 iting innovation.\n\nIn this talk\, I'll describe our experiences in trans
 itioning our UC\nBerkeley work on agile hardware development and the free 
 and open\nRISC-V instruction set architecture into the real world through 
 our\nstartup\, SiFive.  SiFive is attempting to build a new semiconductor\
 nbusiness model based on an agile\, open-source approach to mass\ncustomiz
 ation of semiconductors\, dramatically reducing the cost to get\nnew ideas
  into silicon.
LOCATION:Lecture Theatre 1\, Computer Laboratory
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