April 2012 - Page 2 of 4 - Semiconductor Engineering

Which Comes First?
By Ed Sperling - 26 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

The increasing numbers of software engineers inside of hardware companies, coupled with predictions about how the software stack will increase over time to include applications, has produced a lot of speculation about what the starting point should be for design. Will it remain the hardware? Or will it be the software? The answer, gleaned from literally dozens of interviews, is beginning to ... » read more

Roundtable: Bridging Hardware And Software
By Ed Sperling - 25 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

System-Level Design talks about where the problems are with hardware-software co-design and how much progress we've made with Narendra Konda of Nvidia, Frank Schirrmeister of Cadence, Shabtay Matalon of Mentor Graphics, Kurt Shuler of Arteris and Jack Greenbaum of Green HIlls Software. [youtube vid=EOUPsDOYGq8] » read more

High-End Audio Made Easy: The Software Story
By Various Writers - 25 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

Audio requirements are soaring. Whereas audio used to be done in a few spare cycles of the main CPU, decoding today’s Blu-ray Disc 24-bit, 192 kHz high-definition audio streams, or post-processing 9.1 channel Pro Logic IIz streams, requires significant performance. An obvious solution is to offload the processing to one or more dedicated audio digital signal processors (DSPs) such as the Desi... » read more

Power Benefits Of Modular Interconnect Design Using Network-On-Chip Technology
By Various Writers - 25 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

The system-on-chip (SoC) interconnect spans the entire floorplan of a chip and consumes a significant portion of the power. The interconnects of today’s SoCs are a distributed architecture of switches, buffers, firewalls, register slices, and clock and power domain crossings. One approach is to implement these units modularly with a simple, universal transport protocol between all units. This... » read more

Picking The Right Processor
By Frank Schirrmeister - 24 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 1

By Frank Schirrmeister In an embedded system, the sole connection point between the software and the hardware is the processor. Somewhere right now the effort to develop software for a complex System-on-Chip (SoC) is surpassing the effort of developing the chip itself. As I pointed out in my recent description of the Design West conference in San Jose, complex ecosystems of related content, to... » read more

ST-Ericsson 28nm FD-SOI smartphone SOC, Q3 tape-out (interview)
By Various Writers - 24 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

ASN recently had a chance to talk to ST-Ericsson’s Chief Chip Architect Louis Tannyeres  about the move to 28nm FD-SOI for smartphones and tablet SOCs.  Take-away message:  FD-SOI solves – with less process complexity – scaling, leakage and variability issues to further shrink CMOS technology beyond 28nm. Here's what he said. ~~ [caption id="attachment_441" align="alignleft" wi... » read more

What Needs To Be Fixed
By Ed Sperling - 20 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

Some incredible engineering feats at the nano level—particularly below 40nm—are making their way into production chips. Even creating a sub-micron chip in the first place is a testament to the advances in semiconductor engineering. Turning off large sections of the chip and implementing techniques such as voltage and frequency scaling, power gating, multiple voltage rails and islands, multi... » read more

Finite Math
By Ed Sperling - 13 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

In his keynote speech at the Mentor User-To-User conference yesterday, Sameer Halepete, Nvidia’s vice president of LSI engineering, made a very interesting point. At all levels of computing, from smartphones to the data center, the power budget is fixed, and the old ways of addressing it aren’t working. What that means is that there will not be a single solution to reducing power. It ca... » read more

Incumbency rules! – in lithography as elsewhere.
By Michael Watts - 12 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

by Michael P.C. Watts If double patterning gets established is it just a stop gap until EUV ? This was the entertaining subject at coffee with my editor at semimd (the great thing about writing a free blog is that you get to buy your own coffee when you meet – and yes, we need to find something more fun to talk about !) We were discussing the latest in lithography that were the subject ... » read more

Betting On Subsystems
By Ed Sperling - 05 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling One of the consistent trends among successful companies, particularly in well-established industries, is that over time labor becomes specialized. No one can do everything well, and the more complex the systems the more pieces have to be outsourced. This creates immediate benefits for companies putting together the overall systems. They can focus on designs and doing what the... » read more

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