Author's Latest Posts


Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 28


Power converter for IoT At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, researchers from MIT presented a new power converter that is efficient at a wide range of currents, which could be a boon for IoT sensors that have variable power requirements. The device maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 500 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a 200,000-fold increase in... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A ARM made two acquisitions to add the new NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) low power wide area connectivity standard to its designs: Mistbase, founded in 2015 in Sweden, provides a complete NB-IoT physical layer implementation solution, while London-based NextG-Com, founded in 2008, offers a complete layer two and three software stack for NB-IoT. Tools Synopsys released the latest versio... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 22


Mentor's Brian Derrick digs into the state of the electric vehicle industry and whether established OEMs will be able to make the changes required to meet new consumer demands. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on how to greatly improve the efficiency of machine learning, without using custom hardware, in a talk by Stanford's Kunle Olukotun. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi warns not to overlook ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 21


Harvesting energy from multiple sources Researchers from the University of Oulu in Finland found a particular type of perovskite, KBNNO, has the right properties to extract energy from multiple sources simultaneously. While perovskites are particularly known for their use as solar cells, certain minerals in the perovskite family show piezoelectric and pyroelectric (harvesting energy from ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics launched the company's third generation data-center friendly emulation platform, Veloce Strato. The emulator has a capacity of 2.5BG when fully loaded, and total capacity can be increased by linking emulators. It has available slots for 64 Advanced Verification Boards (AVBs) and fully loaded consumes up to 50KW (22.7 W/Mgate) of power. Aldec uncorked the latest versi... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 15


Mentor's Jean-Marie Brunet looks at factors driving the growth of hardware emulation for SoCs. Cadence's Dave Pursley asserts that the role of hardware developers is about to change for the better. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi says that major software vulnerabilities are becoming less frequent, in spite of hype surrounding named bugs. ARM's Rhonda Dirvin discusses the release of the OpenFog... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 14


Electronics for Venus A team of scientists at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland demonstrated the first prolonged operation of electronics in the harsh conditions found on Venus. Current Venus landers can only operate on the planet's surface for a few hours due to the extreme atmospheric conditions. The surface temperature on Venus is nearly 860 degrees Fahrenheit, and the planet h... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


IP Rambus unveiled High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Gen2 PHY developed for GlobalFoundries' FX-14 ASIC platform. The PHY, targeted at networking and data center applications, is fully compliant with the JEDEC HBM2 standard and supports data rates up to 2000 Mbps per data pin, for a total bandwidth of 256 GB/s. Omnitek launched a number of new FPGA-based video IPs, including HDMI2.0 Tx and Rx, ... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 8


Mentor's Craig Armenti looks at some of the challenges involved with multi-board PCB or system design. Cadence's Paul McLellan highlights a presentation by Igor Keller on the state of the art in static timing analysis. Synopsys' Eric Huang has some ideas for USB interoperability testing. Intel's Ron Wilson delves into the current state of 5G, and why perspectives on that differ. Ans... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 7


Infrared links for data centers Researchers at Penn State, Stony Brook University and Carnegie Mellon University developed a free space optical link for communication in data centers using infrared lasers and receivers mounted on top of data center racks. According to Mohsen Kavehrad, professor of electrical engineering at Penn State, "It uses a very inexpensive lens, we get a very narrow... » read more

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