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Ann Mutschler

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Ann Mutschler is senior executive editor at Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

Silence Is Golden
By Ann Mutschler - 01 Dec, 2010 - Comments: 0

As the industry continues to march along building devices with ever-increasing battery life, it is necessary to migrate to the latest and greatest process nodes, which as we all know are smaller and use lower voltages. However, any noise in the system—whether it was there before or you start to use something like USB 3.0 or SATA or something else—is actually going to increase the number of ... » read more

Standards Update
By Ann Mutschler - 18 Nov, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler In the sometimes-murky waters of system-level modeling standards where real-world adoption can be difficult to track, work is progressing to help hardware and software engineers realize the promise of true hardware-software codesign. The three main standards efforts related to modeling at the system level are OSCI’s TLM-2.0, OCP-IP’s OCP and Open Modeling TAB a... » read more

Reducing Bottlenecks
By Ann Mutschler - 18 Nov, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler For the first time ever, China recently earned fastest supercomputer bragging rights with its Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which can perform 2.57 quadrillion computing operations per second. The machine has been successfully used to survey mines, forecast weather and design high-end machinery. While it has caused concern, it is important to note that the Tianhe-1A use... » read more

Making Power Delivery Networks Better
By Ann Mutschler - 04 Nov, 2010 - Comments: 0

Careful design of power delivery networks can make the difference in whether a chip manages power effectively or fails completely. This impact of cost and other factors in the design process has not gone unnoticed. Aveek Sarkar, vice president of customer support and product engineering at Apache Design Solutions, pointed to the iPhone as an example, where 50% or more of the bill of material... » read more

Best Practices For Multicore SoC Test And Debug
By Ann Mutschler - 21 Oct, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler In increasingly complex SoC designs, many of which contain multiple cores and multiple modes, determining best practices for testing and debugging is a moving target. Jason Andrews, architect at Cadence Design Systems, said multicore debug is a huge issue. It isn’t easy to do, and there aren’t many good ways to do it. He suggested one approach is to try to u... » read more

Bridging IP With Verification Standards
By Ann Mutschler - 21 Oct, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Standards body Accellera is sounding the gong to summon all verification IP providers to check out its efforts in connection with IP-XACT -- IEEE 1685, "Standard for IP-XACT, Standard Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-Using IP Within Tool-Flows” – with verification IP. The IP-XACT technical committee has been busy over the past year. Formerly an effor... » read more

Connecting IP Blocks
By Ann Mutschler - 07 Oct, 2010 - Comments: 0

Is there a standard way to hook up specifically low-power IP blocks today? For all intents and purposes, no. Before even talking about IP interoperability in terms of power, Philippe Magarshack, general manager of central CAD and design solutions at STMicroelectronics asserted those IPs must be hooked up correctly functionally and in a productive and safe way. He said ST is forging ahead ... » read more

Moving To Open-Source Software
By Ann Mutschler - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the typical cost of software accounting for 40% to 60% of an SoC, semiconductor OEMs are under more pressure than ever to meet margins. As a result, they are drawing on their ecosystem partners to provide a more complete foundation including hardware, software, FPGA prototypes, verification IP and virtual models, as well as an increasing demand for open source so... » read more

Estimating Power From Mobile Device Apps
By Ann Mutschler - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler How do software application developers – even the ones sitting at home on their living room sofas with laptops – measure the power consumption of their application on the target device? This is a big problem today (something that is painfully obvious to owners of iPhones or Blackberries), and it will only get bigger. Software engineers may think it is not their... » read more

Burn, Baby, Burn
By Ann Mutschler - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

Obviously, software burns power on mobile devices, but exactly how? I found out recently, thanks to Pete Hardee, director of solutions marketing at Cadence Design Systems. Essentially, Hardee said, there are four ways that software burns power, following in order from most to least. First, depending on the mode, various peripherals are on and off and the big one for a smartphone is the LC... » read more

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