April 2010 - Page 2 of 2 - Semiconductor Engineering

The Problem With Proximity

By Ed Sperling - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling At 90nm companies had to begin thinking seriously about how the signals inside a chip would begin interfering with each other. At 40nm and beyond, they have to consider how signals are interfering with each other across an entire device that may include multiple SoCs. This marks an interesting shift in what companies have been calling holistic design for the better part of a ... » read more

Killer Bugs

By Ed Sperling - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Hardware and software bugs are all around us. When an application suddenly dies or a smart phone freezes because of the unanticipated interaction between hardware and software blocks in a system on chip, most users aren’t even the least bit fazed. They usually just re-boot and forget about it. Bugs caused by power are an entirely different matter, however. For one thing, ... » read more

The GaN Plan

By Ann Mutschler - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Given the need to control power in high-end market segments such as servers, notebooks, mobile handsets and wired communications equipment, the market for gallium nitride (GaN)-based chips is poised for explosive growth. Case in point: Server farms are using more and more electricity, and the cost of that power is getting to be a significant fraction of the operati... » read more

Pricey Processes For Low Power

By Ed Sperling - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Recently Samsung gave an update on the status and availability of its advanced 32/28nm process technology for use in foundry. The process is targeted for shipping designs to customers at the end of this year, with a road map that continues through the 22/20nm nodes and down to 15nm. What was particularly interesting were several key innovations that have made this all p... » read more

Slow and Steady Wins The (Low-Power) Race

By Bhanu Kapoor - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Bhanu Kapoor Power is a key reason behind the shift in processor design to leverage multi-core architectures because it promises increase in performance without a proportional increase in energy consumption. For an application developer, today’s processors—microprocessors, as well as embedded system processors such as cell phone application processors and wireless sensor network n... » read more

Experts At The Table: Verification Nightmares

By Ed Sperling - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down with Shabtay Matalon, ESL marketing manager in Mentor Graphics’ Design Creation Division; Bill Neifert, CTO at Carbon Design Systems; Terrill Moore, CEO of MCCI Corp., and Frank Schirrmeister, director of product marketing for system-level solutions at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPE: What’s the big problem in ... » read more

It’s All About Power

By Ann Mutschler - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

In my last entry regarding IBM’s claim for new x86 technology for the datacenter, I mentioned I was trying to get an answer from IBM regarding details on the “silicon innovation” it used. That quest is ongoing, and I hope to find some actual technology, and not just marketing mumbo-jumbo at the heart of it. Keep checking back, I will give my report here. Just a few weeks after Big Blue... » read more

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