Author's Latest Posts


Blog Review: Sept. 23


From the International Motor Show (IAA) in Frankfurt, NXP's Birgit Ahlborn brings us a discussion with on the challenges to building trust in connected cars and intelligent transport systems, and what is needed to ensure security in a world of connected mobility. From the world's largest aircraft to terahertz wireless to the launch of a partially reusable orbital rocket, innovation is in the... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 22


Photonic memories A team of researchers from Oxford University, the University of Münster, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the University of Exeter produced the first all-photonic nonvolatile memory chip. The new device uses the phase-change material Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST), used in rewritable CDs and DVDs, to store data. This material can be made to assume an amorphous state, like glass... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A Mentor Graphics acquired the rest of Calypto. In 2011, Mentor sold Calypto their high-level synthesis solution – Catapult – in exchange for 51% of the company, but left it as a fully standalone entity. Calypto will now be merged into Mentor as a standalone business unit. Tools Synopsys released its HAPS-80 FPGA-based prototyping system. According to Synopsys, the system pro... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 16


Ansys' Justin Nescott presents five top engineering articles for the week. Being an amateur photography buff, I start salivating at a 250 megapixel camera. Plus, origami and the art of structural engineering and a football-playing robot. Synopsys' Michael Posner provides some shocking information about the buildup of static electricity and the impact it can have on 28nm designs. Increasin... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 15


Stretchy metal Washington State University researchers stretched metal films used in flexible electronics to twice their size without breaking. The discovery could lead to dramatic improvements and addresses one of the biggest challenges in flexible electronics, an industry still in its infancy with applications such as bendable batteries, robotic skins, wearable monitoring devices and se... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 2


When it comes to cars, manufacturers may be adding too many features too fast, says Mentor's John Day. Up to half of the features may never get used either because they aren't useful or they are too complex. Cadence's Christine Young sat down with Neeti Bhatnagar, a software engineering group director to discuss the challenges and rewards of working in a distributed, cross-functional team, t... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 1


Growing graphene nanoribbons University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers discovered a way to grow graphene nanoribbons with desirable semiconducting properties directly on a conventional germanium semiconductor wafer. This could allow manufacturers to easily use graphene nanoribbons in hybrid integrated circuits, which promise to significantly boost the performance of next-generation electroni... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A Tessera boosted its 2.5D and 3D-IC capabilities with the acquisition of Ziptronix. The $39 million cash purchase adds a low-temperature wafer bonding technology platform, which has been licensed to Sony for volume production of CMOS image sensors. Numbers Semico Research forecasts that the SoC market will approach $200 billion by 2019. According to its analysis, average die are... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 26


Synopsys' Marc Greenberg attended IDF and learned more about the newly announced Intel/Micron 3D XPoint memory technology named Optane including initial ship dates and some implementation details. In concluding his analysis of the 2014 Functional Verification Study, Mentor's Harry Foster reveals an unexpected finding about design size and respins. How do you keep your power grid from bein... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Aug. 25


Speeding up quantum computing A team of physicists from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences demonstrated a new quantum computation scheme in which operations occur without a well-defined order. The researchers used this effect to accomplish a task more efficiently than a standard quantum computer. Moreover, these ideas could set the basis for a new form of quantum c... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →