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The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A ARM acquired Carbon Design Systems and its staff for an undisclosed sum, adding virtual prototyping capabilities for ARM cores. In 2008, ARM sold Carbon the tools it acquired in the 2004 purchase of virtual prototype development company AXYS Design Automation. Tools Mentor Graphics updated its PADS software, adding 3D tool capabilities to provide visualization, placement, and d... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 21


Ansys' Bill Vandermark goes back to the future in this week's top five picks. Plus, the star of the world's longest hoverboard flight gets an upgrade. Perhaps the person riding it will be wearing an ocean-cleaning bikini. Straight from MemCon 2015, Rambus' Aharon Etengoff brings us a keynote exploring the increasingly blurred lines between memory and storage, and how an alternative paradigm ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 20


Memristors come in threes The race is on to produce a commercial memristor, and a duo from ETH Zurich may be providing a bit more push. "Basically, memristors require less energy since they work at lower voltages," explained Jennifer Rupp, professor in the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich. "They can be made much smaller than today's memory modules, and therefore offer much greater de... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A Continuing to seek economies of scale in the IP industry, VeriSilicon and Vivante are combining forces. "This transaction creates an extensive semiconductor IP portfolio that will now include GPU cores, vision image processors, digital signal processors, video codecs, mixed signal IP and foundry foundation IP," said Wayne Dai, VeriSilicon chairman, president and CEO. The merged compa... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 14


Rambus' Aharon Etengoff explores how new optical interfaces are aiding the burgeoning field of optogenetics, which combines genetic targeting of specific neurons or proteins with optical technology to study living neural circuits. Anand Shirahatti, Divyang Mali, and Naveen G of Synopsys team up to explain three features that make the MIPI UniPro mobile interconnect stand out, along with the ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 13


Cooling down FPGAs Georgia Institute of Technology researchers found a way to put liquid cooling a few hundred microns away from where the transistors are operating by cutting microfluidic passages directly into the backsides of production FPGAs. The research, backed by DARPA, is believed to be the first example of liquid cooling directly on an operating high-performance CMOS chip. To ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Imec and Cadence completed the first tapeout of a 5nm test chip. Using a processor design, the companies taped out a set of designs using EUV lithography as well as Self-Aligned Quadruple Patterning for 193i lithography, where metal pitches were scaled from the nominal 32nm pitch down to 24nm to push the limit of patterning. Tools Synopsys folded in recent acquisition Atrenta's testabilit... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 7


Ansys' Sunil Nakum takes a look at backing up the brain and concludes that we would need to keep following Moore's Law for a long time given the current approaches and leave several questions unanswered. There is a battle brewing between high-efficiency LED lighting and vintage-style Edison bulbs. With the latest lighting fad, Mentor's John McMillan asks, is style and nostalgia beating high-... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 6


Portabella batteries Researchers at the University of California, Riverside created a new type of lithium-ion battery anode using portabella mushrooms, which are inexpensive, environmentally friendly and easy to produce. The current industry standard for rechargeable lithium-ion battery anodes is synthetic graphite, which comes with a high cost of manufacturing because it requires tedious pu... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


EDA industry revenue increased 8.5% for Q2 2015 to $1906.5 million, according to the latest report from the EDA Consortium. The four-quarters moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four quarters, also increased by 8.5%. IP showed continued strength, with revenue totalling $611.7 million in Q2 2015, a 15% increase compared to Q2 2014; the four-quarters moving a... » read more

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