January 2013 - Page 5 of 5 - Semiconductor Engineering

Moore’s Law Revisited

By Ed Sperling - 17 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

Moore’s Law, for all its re-interpretation, remains an iconic economic statement about doubling transistors over a fixed period of time—despite the fact that the time frame has changed at least twice since Gordon Moore first postulated his formula for shrinking features. Still, you don’t shrink feature sizes unless there is some economic benefit, and increasingly you don’t get an econom... » read more

CES 2013: Signs Of Things To Come

By Synopsys - 17 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Cary Chin It’s always fun to see the latest gadgets introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show, held last week in Las Vegas. This year, two in particular stuck in my mind. First, in what is clearly still a fledgling industry (not necessarily for technology reasons), Audi demonstrated its self-driving car, with the added twist that you could “call” your car. It remotely started up, ma... » read more

Reducing Cost And Mitigating Risk

By Aveek Sarkar - 17 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Aveek Sarkar & Lawrence Williams How will you design your next generation of products and keep pace with rapidly evolving market needs, while managing your margins? Many industries face these same design challenges. The speed of new product development—especially for meeting complex new design requirements—has never been more demanding. Historically, the rise in product development ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Latency

By Ed Sperling - 17 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance engineering sat down to discuss latency with Chris Rowen, CTO at Tensilica; Andrew Caples, senior product manager for Nucleus in Mentor Graphics’ Embedded Software Division; Drew Wingard, CTO at Sonics; Larry Hudepohl, vice president of hardware engineering at MIPS; and Barry Pangrle, senior power methodology engineer at Nvidia. What follows are exce... » read more

Apple’s Impact On Battery Power

By Ann Mutschler - 17 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

More than one person I’ve spoken with lately has pointed out the fact that battery life is no longer the most important thing when a consumer is choosing a smartphone. Wait! I thought power was the #1, be all end all in the mobile area. It was, until the Apple iPhone showed up on the scene and stole the show, dazzling consumers with the touch screen, unique features, and very Apple-like ex... » read more

Roundtable: Battery Life Vs. Delay

By Ed Sperling - 16 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

Low-Power High-Performance Engineering talks about the challenges of dealing with latency in semiconductor design with Andrew Caples of Mentor Graphics, Chris Rowen of Tensilica, Drew Wingard of Sonics and Larry Hudepohl of MIPS Technologies. [youtube vid=Q_opQ3W9esA] » read more

3 Ways To Differentiate

By Ed Sperling - 13 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

Time-to-market pressures and complexity have put the squeeze on design teams. They have to bring incredibly complex SoCs to market on time, make sure they’re functionally correct and work within a tight power budget, and they have to come in on or under budget. Amazingly, they’re still able to accomplish this, thanks to some heroic efforts on the part of engineers and some incredible adv... » read more

Brother, Can You Spare An Electron?

By Ed Sperling - 11 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

Every now and then in semiconductor design we come to a crossroads where we have to start thinking about problems differently. At 10nm we will be forced to do that again. The problem—or opportunity, depending on your vantage point—this time involves electrons. While they’ve become increasingly difficult to manage in ever-thinner wires, where RC delay is producing unwanted heat, and in ... » read more

The Next Big Thing

By Ed Sperling - 04 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

One of the interesting things about boom markets in technology is that they’re almost always built on other technological developments. Typically what happens is technologies are combined into a new whole or system, which explains how the telegraph gave way to the telephone, and how radio became the basis for television. The computer age had its own set of building blocks that were used to... » read more

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