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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

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Chips Rambus moved into the fabless market with the announcement that it is developing memory controller chips, expanding the company's business beyond just creating IP for the memory and security markets. Read Ed Sperling's full analysis. Standards Accellera updated the Standard Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI). The newest version of the standard, SCE-MI 2.3, expands the set o... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 19


Several of this week's top reads from Ansys' Justin Nescott sound like they're straight from the pages of sci-fi novels (and comic books). An MIT project is getting close to creating the Iron Man suit, one company plans to finally build a space elevator, and Los Angeles takes an innovative approach to fighting the California drought: 96 million black plastic balls. Smartphones are so yestery... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Aug. 18


Reducing crosstalk with tantalum oxide memories Scientists at Rice University created a solid-state memory technology that allows for high-density storage with a minimum incidence of crosstalk errors. The memories are based on tantalum oxide. Applying voltage to a 250-nanometer-thick sandwich of graphene, tantalum, nanoporous tantalum oxide and platinum creates addressable bits where the ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Summit Research reports on the proposed buyout of Micron by China's Tsinghua Unigroup. New York Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a letter urging the United States to block any potential sale of the Boise memory-chip maker to the group. Summit states the Tsinghua investment is more likely to be a stake in Micron that specifically forbids certain IP to be made available in order to protect national se... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 12


SIM cards are protected by AES-128, which is supposed to be virtually unbeatable by a brute-force attack. But there's still a weakness: Rambus' Aharon Etengoff reports on how a researcher at Jiao Tong University exploited side-channel attack techniques to crack the encryption codes protecting 3G and 4G SIM cards. After recent reports on compromised car security, auto makers are likely search... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Aug. 11


Tilting magnets for memory UC Berkeley researchers discovered a new way to switch the polarization of nanomagnets, which may offer a way for high-density storage to move from hard disks onto integrated circuits and potentially open the door to a memory system that can be packed onto a microprocessor. Creating and switching polarity in magnets without an external magnetic field has been a ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Cadence unveiled Joules, its new RTL power analysis solution. The tool performs design synthesis using a new integrated prototype mode of Cadence's Genus Synthesis product, including physically aware clock tree and datapath buffering, and enabling accurate RTL power estimation. IP Synopsys and ASMedia completed a successful interoperability demonstration of Synopsys' USB 3.1 Devi... » read more

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