April 2009 - Page 2 of 2 - Semiconductor Engineering

Life Without Batteries Or Wires

By Ed Sperling - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling In portable devices, low-power design has always been about stretching out the amount of time between battery charges or replacement. But the focus of current research throws that approach to the wind. The new goal is to get rid of batteries altogether and generate power using a variety of different mechanisms ranging from differences in temperature, the motion of waves, static... » read more

Writing Software For Low-Power Systems

By Ed Sperling - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Almost any discussion of software in low power systems these days involves some sort of multicore approach. That is particularly true at 90nm and below. At 65nm, unless there is a very distinct purpose for a low-power single-core device, it probably is utilizing at least two cores, and at 45nm the numbers can continue to rise, depending upon how many functions the chip is being... » read more

Making Batteries Better

By Brian Fuller - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Brian Fuller The world has changed dramatically in the 209 years since Alessandro Volta hunched over his table by candlelight and figured out how to capture energy in his voltaic pile, the first electric battery. What has changed little, however, is the battery itself. Since Volta’s conception, the battery has remained a cell with negative and positive electrodes, an electrolyte, and... » read more

Pure Science, Plain And Simple

By Ed Sperling - 09 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

In a rather striking bit of irony, tools for creating semiconductors are able to use multicore architectures just fine. The problems these design tools are trying to solve can be parallelized to the point where simulations and models can be created in hours instead of weeks, or versus months in the case of Excel spreadsheets. The real question, though, is whether the multicore designs th... » read more

Experts At The Table: Platform-Based Design

By Ed Sperling - 09 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down with Simon Bloch, vice president and general manager of ESL/HDL Design and Synthesis at Mentor Graphics; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atrenta; and Jim Hogan, a private investor. What follows are excerpts of a lively, often contentious two-hour conversation. SLD: Let’s start out with a point of reference before we get going on ... » read more

What Happens When We Hit Bottom?

By Ed Sperling - 02 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

The economy appears to have hit bottom. This is good news, but there are caveats. First of all, not all industries will recover at the same rate. Communications never fully recovered from the dot-com bubble. Anyone who bet big on a communications recovery has either switched careers or retired. Now it looks as if the auto industry will be dragging for some time, and companies that hitche... » read more

What Works…And What Doesn’t

By Ed Sperling - 02 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

Lisa Su, chief technology officer at Freescale, talks about the future of system-level design, what's working and where the problems are. [youtube vid=zw5dUTuO7DY] » read more

Tech Talk: Saving Power By The Milliwatt

By Ed Sperling - 02 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

Jan Rabaey, head of UC Berkeley's Wireless Research Center and the author of a new book entitled, "Low Power Design Essentials," discusses how to generate small amounts of power and what can be done to reduce the amount of power needed for semiconductor design. [youtube vid=G0j1Sm8RCns] » read more

Newer posts →