Author's Latest Posts


STEM And The IoT


By now, we’ve all heard how the IoT will deeply affect our industry and daily life. Market researchers at Yole Développement predict that In 2024, the IoT device market will represent a $45B business contributing to a total IoT market of $400B. This is going to demand many more engineering brains on the task, which is in direct contrast to something I heard on NPR recently about how some peo... » read more

System Bits: June 2


Subcutaneous medicine chip A biosensor chip developed at EPFL is capable of simultaneously monitoring the concentration of a number of molecules, such as glucose and cholesterol, and certain drugs. It’s only a centimeter long, placed under a patient’s skin, powered by a patch on the surface of the skin, and communicates with a mobile phone. [caption id="attachment_20134" align="alig... » read more

Emulation for Power


Solving power problems in today’s leading-edge SoCs requires not only the best architectural choices but advanced tools and techniques to determine the right path to take. This equates to a combination of hardware emulation and power analysis/optimization software tools. Design teams today must have real-life scenarios to accurately predict the power impact of their architectural decisions... » read more

The Interconnect Bottleneck


With communications playing a crucial role in the design and performance of multi-core SoCs, various interconnect structures have been proposed as promising solutions to simplify and optimize SoC design. However, sometimes things don’t go as planned and the interconnect becomes the bottleneck. “Under high utilization cases the DRAM will be over-constrained with requests from all the a... » read more

System Bits: May 26


Microfluidic cell-squeezing MIT researchers have shown it is possible to use a microfluidic cell-squeezing device to introduce specific antigens inside the immune system’s B cells, providing a new approach to developing and implementing antigen-presenting cell vaccines. These types of vaccines are created by reprogramming a patient’s own immune cells to fight invaders, and are believed ... » read more

How Hard Is FD-SOI Design?


Fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator ([getkc id="220" kc_name="FD-SOI"]) manufacturing technology reached of point of readiness for mass production at the end of March. Along with that, it’s now clear that while there are some impacts on the design flow, those impacts are not game changers. For one thing, the tools required are the same ones currently used for 28nm planar bulk CMOS. The onl... » read more

System Bits: May 19


Foundation for quantum computer In theory, quantum computers are capable of simulating the interactions of molecules at a level of detail far beyond the capabilities of even the largest supercomputers today, which are expected to revolutionize chemistry, biology and materials science. However, the development of quantum computers has been limited by the ability to increase the number of quantu... » read more

Power Management Verification Requires Holistic Approach


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power management [getkc id="10" kc_name="Verification"] issues with Arvind Shanmugavel, senior director, applications engineering at [getentity id="22021" e_name="Ansys-Apache"]; Guillaume Boillet, technical marketing manager at [getentity id="22026" e_name="Atrenta"]; Adam Sherer, verification product management director at [getentity id="22032" e_... » read more

Brain-Inspired Computing


Approaching power/performance tradeoffs from an architectural perspective is essential given the complexities of today’s SoCs. And beyond some traditional techniques that I discussed in a recent article, Bernard Murphy, CTO at Atrenta mentioned that there is currently a lot of buzz about using non-Von Neumann architectures — especially for recognition functions (voice, image and text). ... » read more

Capturing Performance


The challenge of working out the best performance for a given power budget is not a new one, but in many power-sensitive applications, the balance is tricky and requires sophisticated techniques. This is especially true in the media processor market where many systems companies are held back by power, energy and thermal issues. “It's really not a battery problem, it's a thermal problem... » read more

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