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Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Dialog Semiconductor will acquire Creative Chips for approximately $80 million cash, with contingent consideration of up to $23 million. The move will expand Dialog's Industrial IoT portfolio, adding Creative Chips' industrial Ethernet and other mixed-signal products for connecting large numbers of IIoT sensors to industrial networks. Based in Bingen, Germany, Creative Chips was founded in... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 9


In a video, Cadence's Tom Hackett continues his introduction to finite element analysis (FEA) and the important role it can play in electronics deign. Mentor's Colin Walls considers dynamic memory allocation in real-time operating systems and the problems of non-deterministic behavior and ill-defined failure modes. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding contends that ethical hackers are a necessary p... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 9


Topological insulator waveguides Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania and Polytechnic University of Milan applied topological insulators to photonic chips to make reconfigurable waveguides. In topological insulators, charged particles can flow freely on the material's edges but can't pass through the interior. For photonics, topological insulators with edges that could be redefined m... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Synopsys completed its acquisition of QTronic GmbH, a provider of simulation, test tools, and services for automotive software and systems development. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Synopsys launched the PrimeECO design closure solution, a signoff-driven solution that the company says achieves signoff closure with zero iterations. The tool includes a machine-learning-driven Hybrid Ti... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 2


In a video, Cadence's Tom Hackett explains finite element analysis by looking at a simple model of a bridge and showing why FEA techniques are required for analysis of real-world structures. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding examines why the 156-year-old False Claims Act has new relevance when companies are accused of failing to meet cybersecurity standards. Mentor's Colin Walls demystifies memo... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 1


Nighttime power Researchers at UCLA and Stanford University created a low-cost device that harnesses radiative cooling to provide a small amount of renewable energy at night. While the device only provides a small amount of power, it could be useful for areas without reliable electricity or access to batteries. Radiative cooling happens when a surface that faces the sky emits heat as therma... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


eSilicon debuted its 7nm high-bandwidth interconnect (HBI)+ PHY IP, a special-purpose hard IP block that offers a high-bandwidth, low-power and low-latency wide-parallel, clock-forwarded PHY interface for 2.5D applications such as chiplets. HBI+ PHY delivers a data rate of up to 4.0Gbps per pin. Flexible configurations include up to 80 receive and 80 transmit connections per channel and up to 2... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 25


Mentor's Dave Rich points out that unexpected values from a constraint solver can often be explained by how Verilog expression evaluation rules affect the solution space of SystemVerilog constraints. Cadence's Madhavi Rao points to the need for new and updated safety and cybersecurity standards for autonomous vehicles and highlights one of the most challenging parts of AV deployment. A Sy... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 24


Textiles for energy storage Scientists at RMIT University developed a way to laser print waterproof textiles with graphene supercapacitors for embedded energy storage. The process takes three minutes to create a 10x10cm patch. The electronic textile is based on nylon coated with PDMS on one side for waterproofing. The other side was paint coated with graphene oxide and a binder to form thin... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Synopsys debuted its new DesignWare ARC EV7x Embedded Vision Processor family for machine learning and AI edge applications. The ARC EV7x Vision Processors integrate up to four enhanced vector processing units (VPUs) and an optional Deep Neural Network (DNN) accelerator with up to 14,080 MACs to deliver up to 35 TOPS performance in 16nm FinFET process technologies under typical ... » read more

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