Author's Latest Posts


Blog Review: Sept. 27


Synopsys' Mukul Dawar highlights the biggest changes coming to the PCIe 4.0 specification, plus a peek at what's new in PCIe 5.0. Cadence's Paul McLellan considers why EDA startups are less common than they used to be. Mentor's David Abercrombie and Alex Pearson discuss new requirements for detecting double patterning errors at advanced nodes. Rambus' Aharon Etengoff reports that secur... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 26


Long-range communication Researchers at the University of Washington developed devices that run on almost zero power can transmit data across distances of up to 2.8 kilometers. The long-range backscatter system, which uses reflected radio signals to transmit data at extremely low power, achieved reliable coverage throughout 4800-square-foot house, an office area covering 41 rooms and a one-acr... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys acquired materials modeling company QuantumWise. QuantumWise tools focus on atomic-scale modeling of nanostructures using quantum-mechanical computational methods, classical potentials, and electrostatic models. Based in Denmark, the company was started in 2008 when it acquired the assets of Atomistix. The technology will be integrated with Synopsys' Sentaurus TCAD. Terms of t... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 20


Mentor's Jeff Miller warns that MEMS accelerometers are vulnerable to takeover using specially constructed sound waves, as demonstrated in a new paper. Synopsys' Pooja Gupta and Srinivas Vijayaragavan explain some major technology updates in SAS 24G with a look at Binary primitives, Extended Binary primitives and primitive parameters. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares highlights from TSMC's ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 19


Healing perovskites A team from the University of Cambridge, MIT, University of Oxford, University of Bath, and Delft University of Technology discovered a way to heal defects in perovskite solar cells by exposing them to light and just the right amount of humidity. While perovskites show promise for low-cost, efficient photovoltaics, tiny defects in the crystalline structure, called traps,... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence unveiled a new equivalence checking tool which features a massively parallel architecture capable of scaling to 100s of CPUs and adaptive proof technology that analyzes each partition and determines the optimal formal algorithm. According to the company, the Conformal Smart Logic Equivalence Checker provides an average of 4X runtime improvement with the same resources over the pr... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 13


Mentor's Andrew Macleod points to some important things to consider when beginning an automotive IC project and why differentiation, not commoditization, should be the goal. Synopsys' Amit Paunikar examines the architecture changes that make LPDDR4 faster while consuming less power. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares highlights from CDNLive Boston, from the latest in silicon photonics to how ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 12


Water-based li-ion battery Researchers at the University of Maryland and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory developed a lithium-ion battery that uses a water-salt solution as its electrolyte and reaches the 4.0 volt mark desired for household electronics, without the fire and explosive risks associated with some commercially available non-aqueous lithium-ion batteries. The battery provides i... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence unveiled an integrated memory design and verification tool, with environments for bitcell design, array and complier verification, and memory characterization. It utilizes existing simulation databases for multi-corner and Monte Carlo analysis, which the company says can lead to a 2X runtime improvement. Solido Design Automation uncorked PVTMC Verifier, which uses machine lear... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 6


Mentor's Jeff Miller explains why hardware security is important for IoT edge devices, where vulnerabilities lie today, and how researchers created an undetectable backdoor attack circuit. Cadence's Meera Collier argues that while AI is getting good at many things, composing music is not yet one of them. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi considers the state of voting machine security as security re... » read more

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