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Ann Mutschler

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Ann Mutschler is senior executive editor at Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

Know What To Look For
By Ann Mutschler - 13 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

With the number of power domains exploding in today’s ICs, it’s extremely difficult to include all different modes of complexity in the verification. “The problem was already challenging enough,” observed Mark Baker, director of product marketing at Atrenta. “Just looking at where SoC design was going was a collection of various IPs, the different communication protocols, the bus ... » read more

Automation Can’t Replace Human Intervention
By Ann Mutschler - 13 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

We work in a dynamic industry where the focus is on making it easier to design and verify semiconductor chips by automating tasks for the design engineer. There is so much emphasis on this that I wonder if it is easy to forget the value of that designer’s experience. No matter how automated a process gets, there is always the fundamental assumption that the engineer knows what is happening be... » read more

System Bits: March 11
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Colored diamonds: a superconductor’s best friend Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and UCLA have figured out that colored diamonds can measure the tiny magnetic fields in high-temperature superconductors, providing a new tool to probe these much ballyhooed but poorly understood materials. Diamond sensors will give us m... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 11
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Multiferroic materials In an advance aimed at making future electronic devices far more energy-efficient than current technologies, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have made major improvements in computer processing using an emerging class of magnetic materials called multiferroics. The team used multiferroic magnetic materials to reduce the... » read more

System Bits: March 4
By Ann Mutschler - 04 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Self-completing programs Since he was a graduate student, Armando Solar-Lezama, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been working on a programming language called Sketch -- which allows programmers to simply omit some of the computational details of their code – and then automatically fills in the gaps. If it’s fleshed out and ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 4
By Ann Mutschler - 04 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Photon glue Like a spring connecting two swings, light can act as photon glue that binds together the quantum mechanical properties of two vastly different materials and this effect could harness the most useful characteristics from each material for hybrid solar cells and high efficiency lighting, among other applications. To this end, researchers at the University of Michigan and Queens Coll... » read more

Reducing And Optimizing Power
By Ann Mutschler - 03 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

While power optimization/reduction techniques such as clock gating do help engineering teams improve designs from a power perspective, more can be done. In fact, there are tools and methodologies under development to incorporate power in a more meaningful way. Part of that involves accurately pinpointing what designers should be looking for. “If you look at academia or research that has... » read more

Evolution Vs. Revolution
By Ann Mutschler - 27 Feb, 2014 - Comments: 1

In the electronic design automation industry changes to tools and flows are nearly always evolutionary. They hide as much change from the user as possible, allowing easier justification from an ROI perspective, and they raise far fewer objections from users, who don’t have to spend time learning how to use new technology or rethink tried and true approaches to problems. Revolution in chip ... » read more

Is Verification At A Crossroads?
By Ann Mutschler - 27 Feb, 2014 - Comments: 1

As SoC verification methodologies and technologies have continued to mature, it’s an interesting time for engineering teams as they look to meet time to market goals and cut costs in an environment of cutthroat profit margins. Whether it is hardware emulation, FPGA prototyping, virtual prototyping or traditional software simulation, each platform has its strengths and drawbacks, with overl... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 25
By Ann Mutschler - 25 Feb, 2014 - Comments: 0

A faster Internet While light is capable of carrying vast amounts of information, to utilize its potential, the laser light needs to be as spectrally pure—as close to a single frequency as possible. The purer the tone, the more information it can carry. For decades researchers have been trying to develop a laser that comes as close as possible to emitting just one frequency. Today's world... » read more

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