Author's Latest Posts


Where Do We Stand With CDC?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss where the industry stands on clock domain crossing with Charlie Janac, CEO of Arteris; Shaker Sarwary, VP of Formal Verification Products at Atrenta; Pranav Ashar, CTO at Real Intent; and Namit Gupta, CAE, Verification Group at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the biggest use models for CDC verification today... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 15


Improving battery performance with sand Researchers at the University of California, Riverside’s Bourns College of Engineering have created a lithium ion battery that outperforms the current industry standard by three times using sand as the key material. The researchers, who said this is a low cost, non-toxic, environmentally-friendly way to produce high performance lithium ion battery a... » read more

System Bits: July 15


Silicon oxide memories Thanks to a refinement that will allow manufacturers to fabricate devices at room temperature with conventional production methods, Rice University’s silicon oxide technology for high-density, next-generation computer memory is one step closer to mass production. Rice’s silicon oxide memories are a type of two-terminal, “resistive random-access memory” (RRAM) ... » read more

Raising The Abstraction Of Power: Trends


Given that design requirements for today’s SoCs go well beyond performance and area, energy efficiency and its impact on system design plays a major role for many end applications ranging from wireless sensor networks to autonomous vehicles as well as emerging applications in the Internet of Things market segment, where cooling capability is limited and expensive. For these reasons, a comp... » read more

Supporting LP In New Process Nodes


Manufacturing process nodes and EDA tools are advancing all the time, but not always utilized at the same pace. And from a tools perspective, there are challenges to supporting low power in new process nodes while maintaining and improving the existing process nodes. One way design teams address this is by leveraging the most advanced software on the less-than-bleeding edge designs. To th... » read more

Solar State Of Mind


The dog days of summer seem an appropriate time to ponder all things solar while trying to stay cool. To this end, it’s rather encouraging to note more states are embracing solar as part of their energy mix and even the White House takes advantage of it. I was curious to know if there was a map of solar installations in the U.S., and sure enough, I found an interactive one on the website for ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 8


In an advance that could one day enable the miniaturization of laser systems, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the Technical University of Munich have developed a new nonlinear metasurface, or meta mirror. The researchers call their invention a “nonlinear mirror,” which they believe could help advance nonlinear laser systems that are used for chemical sensing, explosi... » read more

System Bits: July 8


Carbon nanotubes “unzipped” into graphene nanoribbons by a chemical process invented at Rice University are finding use in all kinds of projects, but Rice scientists have now found a chemical-free way to unzip them. A Rice materials scientist discovered that nanotubes that hit a target end first turn into mostly ragged clumps of atoms, but nanotubes that happen to broadside the target un... » read more

Rethinking Encryption


With security experts working around the clock to beat the hackers, because the hackers are doing the very same thing to beat the security experts, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that researchers at European university EPFL have cracked a so-called “unassailable encryption algorithm” in just two hours. It turns out, a protocol based on allegedly tamper-proof “discrete... » read more

System Bits: July 1


In the quest to build gadgets that can survive the abuse, engineers have been testing electronic systems based on new materials that are both flexible and switchable – that is, capable of toggling between two electrical states: on-off, one-zero, the binary commands that can program all things digital. At the same time, three Stanford researchers believe that they’ve discovered just such ... » read more

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