Author's Latest Posts


Blog Review: Apr. 18


Cadence's Meera Collier provides an overview of five emerging technologies that could drive the semiconductor industry in the future, from carbon nanotubes to quantum computing. Mentor's Colin Walls reminds embedded software developers of a few common sense tips, including better readability with braces in C/C++ and monitoring stack overflow. Synopsys' Tim Mackey rounds up the last few we... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 17


Flexible LCDs Researchers at Donghua University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology developed a flexible, optically rewriteable LCD for paperlike displays. The team estimates it will be cheap to produce, perhaps only costing $5 for a 5-inch screen. Optically rewriteable LCDs, like conventional LCDs, are structured like a sandwich, with a liquid crystal filling between two ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Cadence unveiled its latest DSP for embedded vision and AI, Tensilica Vision Q6 DSP. The DSP is built on a 13-stage processor pipeline and new system architecture designed for use with large local memories, and achieves 1.5GHz peak frequency and 1GHz typical frequency at 16nm. Compared to its predecessor, it offers 1.5X greater vision and AI performance than its predecessor and ... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 11


Mentor's Dennis Brophy looks at how the black box nature of IP means it's hard to tell if a block is free from security risks, even if verification IP and open-source design code can help. Synopsys' Sri Deepti Pisipati explains Panel Self Refresh, a power saving mechanism in Display Port that allows for turning off the video processor and its circuitry when an image is static. Cadence's P... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Apr. 10


Lithium-air battery Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory designed a new lithium-air battery that works in a natural air environment and still functioned after 750 charge/discharge cycles, a record for this battery type. In theory, lithium-air batteries work by combining lithium present in the anode with oxygen from the air to produce lithium p... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor, a Siemens business, filled in the last of the hardware configurations for its Veloce Strato emulation family, creating a full upgrade path. Users can initially purchase only the hardware that they need (StratoTiL) and if later they require more capacity (StratoTi) or the ability to handle larger designs (StratoT), they can incrementally add the necessary hardware to their existin... » read more

Blog Review: April 4


Synopsys' Richard Solomon explains PCIe's upstream and downstream component naming and why understanding the perspective is key. Mentor's Cristian Filip dives into frequency domain analysis for high data rate SerDes links and the movement toward a simpler way of channel characterization. Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a look at the history of the RISC processors and the death of microcode ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 3


Long-lived data storage Scientists from RMIT University and Wuhan Institute of Technology demonstrated a next-generation optical disk with up to 10TB capacity and a six-century lifespan using gold nanoparticles. The technology could radically improve the energy efficiency of data centers according to the researchers, using 1000 times less power than a hard disk center by requiring far less ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Market research firm IC Insights says fabless IC suppliers accounted for 27% of the world’s IC sales in 2017—an increase from 18% ten years earlier in 2007. U.S. companies accounted for the greatest share of fabless IC sales last year at 53% (down, however, from 2010's share of 69%). Since 2010, the largest fabless IC marketshare increase has come from the Chinese suppliers, which captured ... » read more

Blog Review: March 28


Mentor's Joe Hupcey III and Jin Hou explain how to use the Open Verification Language (OVL) library of assertions to build an effective formal testbench. In a video, Cadence's Marc Greenberg discusses the benefits of moving non-volatile memory from the SSD to the DDR bus and possible new storage-class memories. Synopsys' Anders Nordstrom argues that security can no longer be ignored when ... » read more

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