Author's Latest Posts


Blog Review: April 7


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence report and what it recommends for funding the development of AI as well as semiconductor manufacturing and research. Siemens EDA's Ray Salemi continues exploring Python for verification and shows how to use cocotb to create a simple bus functional model and connect it to a testbench. Synopsys... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 5


Wafer-scale graphene In an attempt to make graphene more useful for photonic devices, researchers from CNIT, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Tecip Institute, University of Cambridge, and Graphene Flagship Associated Member and spin-off CamGraphIC developed a wafer-scale graphene fabrication technology that uses predetermined graphene single-crystal templates, allowing for integration in... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Magnachip will be acquired by Wise Road Capital for $1.4 billion, taking the NYSE-listed company private. The company designs and manufactures OLED display driver ICs and a range of power management discretes and ICs. Magnachip's management team and employees are expected to continue in their roles, and the company will remain based in Cheongju, Seoul, and Gumi, South Korea. The all-cash transa... » read more

Blog Review: March 31


Arm's Pavel Rudko considers several common approaches used to get better performance for neural network inference on mobile devices, such as optimizing and pruning the model and using different processing units to execute different workloads in parallel. Siemens EDA's Ray Salemi introduces basic concepts of using Python for verification and how to get Python to talk to an RTL device-under-te... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 30


Harvesting body heat Researchers at University of Colorado Boulder, Harbin Institute of Technology, Southeast University, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology designed a stretchy thermoelectric generator that can be worn against the skin to power small wearable electronics using body heat. The stretchy material polyimine is used as the base of the device. A series of thin therm... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Companies Pearl Semiconductor launched to provide low and ultra-low noise timing products. “Pearl is a timing company developing resonator-agnostic solutions. We work with quartz crystals, MEMS resonators or whatever achieves superior performance,” said Ayman Ahmed, CEO of Pearl Semiconductor. “Current and future automotive applications demand low noise and a wide operating temperatur... » read more

Blog Review: March 24


Arm's Brian Cline points to a project with GlobalFoundries to demonstrate the feasibility and readiness of high-density, face-to-face, wafer-bonded 3D stacking technologies for high performance, energy-efficient designs. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns that while supply chain security risks aren't new, the recent SolarWinds breach should make everyone pay much more attention to dependencies... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 23


Metasurface for optical media Researchers at Purdue University proposed a new way to store information in optical media, such as CDs and DVDs, that could improve both storage capacity and read times. The development focuses on encoding information in the angular position of tiny antennas, allowing them to store more data per unit area. "The storage capacity greatly increases because it is o... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Qualcomm finalized its acquisition of data center chip startup Nuvia with a price of $1.4 billion. Nuvia is working on a data center SoC and Arm-based CPU core it claims will lower performance per total cost of ownership by matching high performance with high efficiency and limiting maximum power to that which can be dissipated in an air-cooled environment. Qualcomm said Nuvia’s technology wo... » read more

Blog Review: March 17


Synopsys' Chris Clark considers the growing number of automotive sensors and the cost/performance tradeoffs between edge computing capability, sensor fusion, sensor degradation, monitoring, and the maintenance of the software over the lifespan of a vehicle. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out how the process of loading the bootstrap into memory has changed over the years, from hand-entered on... » read more

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