March 2010 - Page 2 of 2 - Semiconductor Engineering

The Long And Painful Path To Power Optimization

By Ed Sperling - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Think about any mobile Internet device today. Batteries typically last all day, applications shut down with ease, and the number of things it can do has reached the point where many people typically carry one device on the road rather than multiple devices they used to lug around several years ago. Perhaps even more astounding is the price drop on these devices. A basic cell ... » read more

LTE Heightens Power-Consumption Concerns

By Ed Sperling - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ellen Konieczny The air interface dubbed Long Term Evolution (LTE) hails the coming of fourth-generation (4G) cellular communications, which will benefit from both increased capacity and speed. Among the lofty goals of 4G technology is the promise of users being able to widely access streaming media, such as mobile television and video, in real time. Before such capabilities can be made ava... » read more

Energy Star Meets Data Security

By Ed Sperling - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Security technology and low power typically don’t go together in the same sentence, let alone the same device. All of that is starting to change, though. With 2% of the world’s energy being consumed by data centers, the new Energy Star guidelines and their associated tax incentives have been driving IT updates and upgrades since 2009 . The security industry is n... » read more

Virtualization In Your Hand

By Ed Sperling - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The addition of multiple cores inside of computers has created an enormous opportunity for virtualization. Instead of running one operating system or one application, a single server or multicore PC can run multiple virtualized OSes on a single machine at the same time. From the standpoint of energy efficiency, this has been a huge gain in data centers and the corporate ent... » read more

Experts At The Table: Low-Power Management And Verification

By Ed Sperling - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering moderated a panel featuring Bhanu Kapoor, president of Mimasic; John Goodenough, director of design technology at ARM; and Prapanna Tiwari, CAE manager at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of their presentations, as well as the question-and-answer exchange that followed. Bhanu Kapoor: There are two types of power you need to consider: Dynamic power, ... » read more

New x86 Technology For The Datacenter?

By Ann Mutschler - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

I wasn’t too surprised when IBM announced new servers early this month that they claim “break constraints of 30-year technology design,” since Big Blue is constantly releasing new products that they say are groundbreaking in one way or another. Reading deeper into the news, IBM is using new semiconductor technology at the heart of its new eX5 servers that it said took its engineering t... » read more

New Forces For Consolidation

By Ed Sperling - 05 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

For the past five-plus decades, the overriding effect of Moore’s Law was to put more circuits on a single piece of silicon. While that’s still the case, the addition of multiple cores since 90nm also has meant more functions can be added to that chip, which creates a whole new business equation for makers of complex devices like smart phones. Instead of creating individual chips, a single... » read more

The Bright—And Much Larger—Future

By Ed Sperling - 01 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

The recent pushes by both Synopsys and Mentor into new markets should say something about the state of EDA. Being able to lay out the wires and subsystems on a chip, not to mention verifying that it all works, will always be vital to getting SoCs to tapeout. But that kind of work will not generate the kind of growth the big EDA companies are looking for—at least not without some major tweaks ... » read more

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