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Ann Mutschler

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Ann Mutschler is senior executive editor at Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

Power Makes IP Integration More Fun
By Ann Mutschler - 08 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

Remember the good old days at 130nm when it was easy to combine IP blocks on an SoC? All kidding aside, because obviously IP integration has always had its challenges, designers are experiencing new pain as process, voltage and temperature wreak havoc in bringing everything together and making sure it operates correctly, meeting all power requirements. As I discovered, whether IP comes from ... » read more

End User Report: EDA Industry Realignment
By Ann Mutschler - 24 Jun, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler The EDA industry has seen a number of large acquisitions as of late, most notably of Denali by Cadence, as well as CoWare, VaST and Virage Logic which were acquired by Synopsys, but just what impact does this realignment have on the biggest EDA customers? Commenting on these changes is Jean-Marc Chateau, director of system platforms and tools at STMicroelectronics, ... » read more

Connecting The Pieces
By Ann Mutschler - 24 Jun, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the amount of IP blocks being integrated in SoCs today – in some cases as many as 100 blocks in a single chip – SoC design methodologies are shifting to address the new challenges this complexity brings. The good news is that these integration challenges has put the spotlight on the issues—along with the skyrocketing development costs for the creation, qual... » read more

Giant Steps—Backward
By Ann Mutschler - 10 Jun, 2010 - Comments: 0

With DAC headlining next week, power is sure to take center stage given its prominence as a key pain point for design engineers that are always on the lookout for a new technique to ease their power management burdens. In many low-power designs, asynchronous technology may be just the thing. One of the biggest disadvantages of the clockless CPU is that most design tools assume a clocked CPU ... » read more

TLM 2.0: Necessary for Co-Simulation
By Ann Mutschler - 27 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Transaction-level modeling – an abstracted representation of design IP above the RT level -- continues to grow in importance for architectural exploration, performance analysis, building virtual platforms for software development, and functional verification. The TLM-2.0 standard is the current industry standard for creating interoperable transaction-level models an... » read more

Balancing Quality, Cost And Locale
By Ann Mutschler - 27 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler As more features are packed into a single SoC there are simply more time-critical decisions to make. Instead of holding up one chip of a six-chip chipset, a delay or error on one chip can stop the whole parade. That explains why one of the most vibrant parts of the business at big EDA companies these days is standard IP, and why most of the other commercial IP make... » read more

Optimizing Physical IP For Applications And Processors
By Ann Mutschler - 13 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

What will the next challenges be for chip designers as the industry moves toward 28nm high-k metal gate manufacturing technology? One thing is for sure, power management may get even more painful without new innovations to handle the characteristics of 28nm. Optimization is definitely the approach that keeps creeping up as I talk with folks in the industry with ARM specifically mentioning ap... » read more

IP’s Ecosystem Race
By Ann Mutschler - 22 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler As the semiconductor industry moves from older manufacturing nodes to newer ones what users want from IP providers is changing. So is the way IP providers are answering those needs. Mirroring the broader semiconductor industry’s recognition that it’s simply too expensive, too difficult and too time consuming to do everything alone—the very basis of the IP sec... » read more

Who’s Calling The Shots Now?
By Ann Mutschler - 22 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Determining who makes the decisions in semiconductor industry is not as easy as it sounds. There is not a straight line of responsibility in today’s market due to changing industry dynamics such as the shift from the IDM business model to the foundry model. “If you go back far enough, everyone had to manufacture their own chips. There was a substantial influenc... » read more

The GaN Plan
By Ann Mutschler - 08 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Given the need to control power in high-end market segments such as servers, notebooks, mobile handsets and wired communications equipment, the market for gallium nitride (GaN)-based chips is poised for explosive growth. Case in point: Server farms are using more and more electricity, and the cost of that power is getting to be a significant fraction of the operati... » read more

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