Balancing The Cost Of Test


As semiconductor devices became larger and more complex, the cost of [getkc id="174" kc_name="test"] increased. Testers were large pieces of capital equipment designed to execute functional vectors at-speed and the technology being used had to keep up with increasing demands placed on them. Because of this, the cost of test did not decrease in the way that other high-tech equipment did. Around ... » read more

Energy Boost For Power Standards


If the amount of standards work and industry effort that is being expended on a given topic is any indicator of the growing importance of a design concern, then power has most certainly become the hottest topic in the industry. Thankfully, it seems as if everyone has learned their lessons from the CPF/[gettech id="31044" t_name="UPF"] struggles and is attempting to coordinate activities, while ... » read more

Reduced Power To The People!


Fifteen years ago, many of us involved in writing the design chapter of the ITRS (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors) already knew that power/energy consumption eventually would become a major problem for the industry’s growth. Engineers developing microprocessors (CPUs and DSPs) and graphics engines (GPUs) led the wave of predictions, because extrapolating known trend data s... » read more

Know What To Look For


With the number of power domains exploding in today’s ICs, it’s extremely difficult to include all different modes of complexity in the verification. “The problem was already challenging enough,” observed Mark Baker, director of product marketing at Atrenta. “Just looking at where SoC design was going was a collection of various IPs, the different communication protocols, the bus ... » read more

Power’s Impact On Hierarchy Modification


RTL restructuring in which the logical hierarchy of a design is modified is usually done to manage complex designs. When power management is added to this task, new challenges crop up. Consider switchable power or voltage domains, which are a common way to manage power is to use switchable power or voltage domains. When implementing this technique, all the logic in such a domain must hang of... » read more

The Problem With EDA Standards


In the EDA industry, does standard mean the same as it does in most industries? The Free Dictionary defines it as: Something, such as a practice or a product, that is widely recognized or employed, especially because of its excellence. In the EDA industry, a standards body is the place where EDA companies and customers come together to try and bring about convergence, often in a new or emerging... » read more

IP-XACT Becoming More Useful


Accellera created analog/mixed signal extensions to the IEEE IP-XACT standard, and the standards group will recommend an update to the overall standard later this year to make it more useful for IP integration. IP-XACT has been considered a great idea since its introduction in 2009 because it allows IP makers to add metadata to their IP—information needed to integrate it into complex desig... » read more

Delicate Balance


By Joe Hupcey III It’s not surprising that power optimization is a critical part of today’s complex designs. Unbeknownst to most consumers is an underlying methodology that every design engineer must follow to make sure a consumer device meets the power requirements of the consumer—even if the consumer doesn’t realize they’re demanding it. The situation in industrial products, suc... » read more

Experts At The Table: Low-Power Verification


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss power format changes with Sushma Hoonavera-Prasad, design engineer in Broadcom’s mobile platform group; John Biggs, consultant engineer for R&D and co-founder of ARM; Erich Marschner, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics; Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence; and Jeffrey Lee, corporate app... » read more

A Tale Of Two Standards


By Ed Sperling It could well be one of the strangest developments in standards history. Two competing standards for power formats were rolled out in the middle of the last decade and aside from a few cries of foul they fell below the radar screen of most chip designers and architects for a half-dozen years. Fast forward to the present and the Common Power Format (CPF) and Unified Power Form... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →