Author's Latest Posts


System Bits: Feb. 28


Software robots have fights lasting years According to University of Oxford and Alan Turing Institute researchers, editing bots on Wikipedia undo vandalism, enforce bans, check spelling, create links and import content automatically, whereas other non-editing bots mine data, identify data or identify copyright infringements — sometimes with unpredictable consequences. The team looked at h... » read more

Embedded FPGAs Come Of Age


FPGAs increasingly are being viewed as a critical component in heterogeneous designs, ratcheting up their stature and the amount of attention being given to programmable devices. Once relegated to test chips that ultimately would be replaced by lower-power and higher-performance ASICs if volumes were sufficient, FPGAs have come a long way. Over the last 20 years programmable devices have mov... » read more

Custom Hardware Thriving


In the early days of the IoT, predictions about the commoditization of hardware and the end of customized hardware were everywhere. Several years later, those predictions are being proven wrong. Off-the-shelf components have not replaced customized hardware, and software has not dictated all designs. In fact, in many cases the exact opposite has happened. And where software does play an elev... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 21


Recreating the brain Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories researchers have created an organic, high-performance, low-energy artificial synapse for neural network computing that aims to better recreate the way the human brain processes information, and could also lead to improvements in brain-machine technologies. Alberto Salleo, associate professor of materials science and e... » read more

Test More Complex For Cars, IoT


With increasing focus on safety-critical semiconductors—driven by ADAS, IoT, and security—functional safety concerns are going through the roof. Engineering teams are scrambling to determine how to conduct better in-field or online testing because test no longer can be an afterthought. This has been a common theme across the automotive ecosystem for the past few years, and as the automot... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 14


Potential anticancer drugs selected by neural network Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology researchers along with Mail.Ru Group, and Insilico Medicine have applied a generative neural network to create new pharmaceutical medicines with certain desired characteristics. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was developed and trained to "invent" new molecular structures in order to dram... » read more

Adapting Formal


With more pressure to make designs efficient — from a power perspective, as well as from an overall design view — finding what can be removed from a design is one step closer. As discussed in the article published today, “What Can Be Cut From A Design?” — sequential analysis, based on formal verification technology, is gaining traction. I specifically asked Mentor Graphics’ direc... » read more

What Can Be Cut From A Design?


A long-standing approach of throwing everything into a chip increasingly is being replaced by a focus on what can be left out it. This shift is happening at every level, from the initial design to implementation. After years of trying to fill every square nanometer of real estate on a piece of silicon with memory and logic, doubling the number of [getkc id="26" kc_name="transistors"] from on... » read more

System Bits: Feb. 7


Large scale quantum computer blueprint An international team comprised of researchers from the University of Sussex, Google, Aarhus University, RIKEN, and Siegen University recently unveiled what they say is the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer. The team asserted that once built, the computer would have the potential to answer many questions in science; create n... » read more

Chip-Package-Board Issues Grow


As systems migrate from a single die in a single package on a board, to multiple dies with multiple packaging options and multiple PCB form factors, it is becoming critical to move system planning, assembly, and optimization much earlier in the design-through-manufacturing flow. This is easier said than done. Multiple tools and operating systems are now used at each phase of the flow, partic... » read more

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