Author's Latest Posts


Automating System Design


Change is underway in the chip design world, creating opportunities and challenges that reach far beyond questions about whether Moore’s Law is slowing or stopping. Never before in the history of semiconductors has design been so complex and sophisticated, and never has it touched so many lives in so many interesting ways. This is all happening as a result of the chip’s enabling role in ... » read more

Bridging Hardware And Software


The barriers between hardware and software design and verification are breaking down with more intricately integrated systems, bringing together different disciplines and tools. But there are lingering questions about exactly what this shift means design methodologies, team interactions, and what kind of training will be required in the future. Playing heavily into this is the fact that toda... » read more

System Bits: April 26


Reconfigured Tesla coil electrifies materials In a development that could set a clear path toward scalable assembly of nanotubes from the bottom up, Rice University researchers have discovered that the strong force field emitted by a Tesla coil causes carbon nanotubes to self-assemble into long wires, a phenomenon they call Teslaphoresis. Rice chemist Paul Cherukuri led the team that develo... » read more

System Bits: April 19


Debugging web apps MIT researchers reported that they’ve developed a system that can quickly comb through tens of thousands of lines of application code to find security flaws by exploiting some peculiarities of the Ruby on Rails web programming framework. The team said that in tests on 50 popular web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed sec... » read more

Convolutional Neural Networks Power Ahead


While the term may not be immediately recognizable, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are already part of our daily lives—and they are expected to become even more significant in the near future. [getkc id="261" kc_name="Convolutional neural networks"] are a form of machine learning modeled on the way the brain's visual cortex distinguishes one object from another. That helps explain wh... » read more

Analyzing The Integrity Of Power


Power analysis is shifting much earlier in the chip design process, with power emerging as the top design constraint at advanced process nodes. As engineering teams pack more functionality and content into bigger and more complex chips, they are having to deal with more complex interactions that affect everything from power to its impact on signal integrity and long-term reliability. That, i... » read more

Are Models Always The Answer?


Given the shift to system level design and the need to make tradeoffs early in the design process, much emphasis is placed on modeling, and for good reason. Tobias Bjerregaard, CEO of Teklatech reminded that power integrity analysis and signal integrity analysis evolved to be more or less a checkmark from many companies. “They run it and then say, ‘OK, it is fine,’ but they don't think... » read more

System Bits: April 12


Highly aligned, wafer-scale films Rice University researchers, with support from Los Alamos National Laboratory, have created inch-wide, flexible, wafer-scale films of highly aligned and closely packed carbon nanotubes with the help of a simple filtration process. The chirality-enriched single-walled carbon nanotubes assemble themselves by the millions into long rows that are aligned better... » read more

Counterfeiting In The Automotive Supply Chain


While counterfeiting is not a new problem in the automotive space by any means, the stakes are higher all the time when you consider the increase in more sophisticated electronics and electronic systems being designed into vehicles today. While we don’t want to think about the worst case scenario of a counterfeit airbag in the family minivan or a counterfeit battery in a hybrid vehicle, we mu... » read more

The Race To Secure The Car


A shift is underway in the automotive industry to connect cars to each other and to a variety of communications infrastructure, adding many of the features that consumers now expect in mobile devices as well as some new ones that ultimately will lead to autonomous vehicles. But along with those changes are some nagging questions about just how safe that technology will be for consumers and othe... » read more

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