Author's Latest Posts


Optimizing Analog For Power At Advanced Nodes


As any engineering manager will tell you, analog and digital engineers seem like they could be from different planets. While this has changed somewhat over time, [getkc id="52" comment="analog"] is still something of a mystery to many in [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"] design teams. Throw power management into the mix and things really get interesting. Improvements in analog/mixed-signal tools... » read more

Balancing Implementation Time, Complexity, Schedule


Design complexity today is demanding all the creativity a design engineer can muster to figure out the best ways to optimize a design for the power situation the device will be operating under. Advanced techniques are being leveraged, to be sure, but in varying degrees, perhaps in part because these techniques impact the complexity of the design implementation. If there are four or five ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 7


Crumpled graphene MIT researchers have now found that crumpling a piece of graphene “paper” — a material formed by bonding together layers of the 2D form of carbon — can yield properties that could be useful for creating extremely stretchable supercapacitors to store energy for flexible electronic devices, such as wearable or implantable biomedical sensors. The team said the new, fl... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 7


Towards spin-based computing It’s a given that semiconductors process electrical information, while magnetic materials enable long-term data storage. Along these lines, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered a way to fuse these two distinct properties in a single material that they believe could pave the way for new ultrahigh den... » read more

High-Level Gaps Emerge


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the attributes of a high-level, front-end design flow, and why it is needed at present with Leah Clark, associate technical director for digital video technology at [getentity id="22649" e_name="Broadcom"]; Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Phil Bishop, vice president of the System Level D... » read more

The Missing Link


What continues to fascinate me about the IoT opportunity is the explosion of creative ideas that are being imagined and developed to enable the next big thing. When I imagine the kind of connectivity and control that will need to happen between the Internet and ‘smart’ devices, these things obviously must be very inexpensive, super small, with the ability to harvest their own energy. ... » read more

System Bits: Sept. 30


Airway muscle-on-a-chip mimics asthma A Harvard University research team has developed a human airway muscle-on-a-chip that could be used to test new drugs as it accurately mimics the way smooth muscle contracts in the human airway, under normal circumstances and when exposed to asthma triggers. The chip also gives a window into the cellular and even subcellular responses within the tissue ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 30


A “perfect” solar absorber According to researchers at MIT, the key to creating a material that would be ideal for converting solar energy to heat is tuning the material’s spectrum of absorption just right: It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth’s surface from the sun — but not much of the rest of the spectrum, since that would increase the energy that i... » read more

Where Do We Stand With CDC


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss where the industry stands on clock domain crossing with Charlie Janac, CEO of [getentity id="22674" e_name="Arteris"]; Shaker Sarwary, VP of Formal Verification Products at [getentity id="22026" e_name="Atrenta"]; Pranav Ashar, CTO at [getentity id="22416" e_name="Real Intent"]; and Namit Gupta, CAE, Verification Group at [getentity id="22035" e_nam... » read more

Challenges Increase for IP At Advanced Nodes


At advanced process nodes such as 16/14/10nm, designing [getkc id="43" comment="IP"] is a much tougher nut to crack due to complexity and other considerations, not to mention then trying to migrate and/or re-use that IP. Still, engineering teams are looking for leverage wherever they can find it in their designs amid the technical challenges to overcome. Tomasz Wojcicki, vice president of c... » read more

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