Author's Latest Posts


2.5D, FO-WLP Issues Come Into Focus


Advanced packaging is beginning to take off after years of hype, spurred by 2.5D implementations in high-performance markets and fan-out wafer-level packaging for a wide array of applications. There are now more players viewing packaging as another frontier driving innovation. But perhaps a more telling sign is that large foundries in Taiwan have begun offering packaging services to customer... » read more

The Software Side Of Self-Driving


Just as the overall system complexity is causing ripples through the automotive supply chain so too is managing the system complexity, with software in particular. With so much new technology, and so many new ideas to keep track of, it would seem a huge undertaking by the automotive OEMs. In the midst of making decisions about the usual incremental improvements, the system architecture decis... » read more

Self-Driving Cars Rattle Supply Chain


Automotive compute workloads are consolidating as carmakers push toward autonomous vehicles, but the changes necessary to make this all work are causing huge disruptions in an industry that has fine-tuned its supply chain over more than a century. Consolidation is essential for a variety of reasons, including efficiency of the computations, complexity management, and lower deployment costs. ... » read more

System Bits: April 4


Nanodevices for extreme environments in space, on earth Researchers at the Stanford Extreme Environment Microsystems Laboratory (XLab) are on a mission to conquer conditions such as those found on Venus: a hot surface pelted with sulfuric acid rains, 480 degrees C, an atmosphere that would fry today’s electronics. By developing heat-, corrosion- and radiation-resistant electronics, the team ... » read more

HBM Upstages DDR In Bandwidth, Power


For graphics, networking, and high performance computing, the latest iteration of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) continues to rise up as a viable contender against conventional DDR, GDDR designs, and other advanced memory architectures such as the Hybrid Memory Cube. [getkc id="276" kc_name="HBM"] enables lower power consumption per I/O and higher bandwidth memory access with a more condensed f... » read more

Custom Chip Verification Issues Grow


With the transition to finFETs, design conditions have grown more intense. They now include a wider PVT range and less headroom. As a result, electronic systems for applications such as mobile, consumer, and automotive increasingly are becoming more difficult to design due to the exacting performance requirements of these applications. This is particularly evident in custom design, including... » read more

System Bits: March 28


Automating biology experiments with adapted Lego kit To bring more of the features of modern biology labs — that often use robotic assemblies to drop precise amounts of fluids into experimental containers — to students and teachers, Stanford University researchers have shown how an off-the-shelf Lego kit can be modified to create inexpensive automated systems to do this in clubs or classro... » read more

EDA Revenue Up 18.9%


Marking the highest quarterly revenue increase in 5 years, the Electronic System Design (ESD) Alliance reported today that EDA revenue increased 18.9 percent for Q4 2016 to $2.455 billion, compared to $2.0645 billion in Q4 2015. The four-quarters moving average was up by 9.2%, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four quarters. Walden C. Rhines, board sponsor for the ESD... » read more

Challenges Grow For IP Reuse


As chip complexity increases, so does the complexity of IP blocks being developed for those designs. That is making it much more difficult to re-use IP from one design to the next, or even to integrate new IP into an SoC. What is changing is the perception that standard [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"] works the same in every design. Moreover, well-developed [getkc id="100" kc_name="methodologie... » read more

System Bits: March 21


Sensors vulnerable to sonic cyber attacks According to University of Michigan researchers, sound waves could be used to hack into critical sensors in a wide range of technologies including smartphones, automobiles, medical devices and IoT devices. New research calls into question the longstanding computer science tenet that software can automatically trust hardware sensors, which feed auton... » read more

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