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Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Aldec expanded the rule-checking capabilities of its ALINT-PRO tool, adding twice as many FSM checks and new graphical representations to aid state exploration. Also included is enhanced setup automation for complex Xilinx Vivado and ISE projects that automatically organizes a workspace to deliver hierarchical and incremental DRC and CDC analysis. Xilinx acquired AI startup DeePhi Technology... » read more

Blog Review: July 18


Synopsys' Shivani Bansal introduces DFI 5.0, the latest interface specification that defines signals, timing, and functionality required for efficient communication between the memory controller and PHY, including changes to boost performance in DDR5/LPDDR5. Mentor's Ricardo Anguiano contends that for greater autonomy in vehicles, centralized sensor fusion is necessary to both reduce the cos... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 16


Bacterial solar Researchers at the University of British Columbia developed a solar cell that uses bacteria to convert light to energy. The cell worked as efficiently in dim light as in bright light, making solar a potential option in areas of the world that frequently have overcast skies. Called biogenic cells, they work by utilizing the natural dye that bacteria use for photosynthesis. Pr... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Intel will acquire fabless company eASIC. Founded in 1999, eASIC sells structured ASIC platforms that act as a midpoint between FPGAs and standard cell ASICs by combining FPGA-like logic and design flows with single via routing. Eventually, Intel sees potential in using its Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) technology to combine Intel FPGAs with structured ASICs in a system... » read more

Blog Review: July 11


Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns that while significant router vulnerabilities have been known about for years, security mostly hasn't been getting better, leading to a 539% increase in attacks targeting routers since the fourth quarter of 2017. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls walks through how to deal with the initialization of non-volatile RAM in embedded programming, including suggestion... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 10


Heating up EV batteries Researchers from Pennsylvania State University developed a self-heating battery that can charge rapidly in cold conditions, a step they hope could spread adoption of electric vehicles. "Electric vehicles are popular on the west coast because the weather is conducive," said Xiao-Guang Yang, assistant research professor in mechanical engineering, Penn State. "Once you ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


CAST debuted an IP subsystem implementing the latest IEEE standards for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) over Ethernet. The TSN_CTRL Subsystem combines three IP cores, a time synchronizer, traffic shaper, and Ethernet MAC. It implements a hardware subsystem that operates without software assistance once programmed. The IP communicates timing information to the system, and allows the system to de... » read more

Blog Review: July 4


Applied Materials' Sundeep Bajikar argues that to get the full benefits of AI, new computing architectures are needed – and that will require new breakthroughs in materials engineering to get beyond classic 2D scaling. Cadence's Tom Wong considers to what extent chip dis-integration is happening and how the industry can cope with the escalating costs of new process nodes and higher-speed i... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 3


Graphene foam devices Scientists at Rice University developed a method for building conductive, three-dimensional objects out of graphene foam, which they say could offer new possibilities for energy storage and flexible electronic sensor applications. The same lab initially created laser-induced graphene, or LIG, in 2014. The process involves heating inexpensive polyimide plastic sheets wi... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Siemens acquired Austemper Design Systems, which provides tools for functional safety and safety-critical designs. Founded in 2015, Texas-based Austemper adds state-of-the-art safety analysis, auto-correction and fault simulation technology to address random hardware faults, as well as correct and harden vulnerable areas, subsequently performing fault simulation to ensure the design is... » read more

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