Tommy Mullane

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Tommy Mullane is a Senior Systems Architect at Adesto Technologies. He received the B.E. degree in Electronic Engineering from the National University of Ireland, Dublin (UCD) in 1997. He has worked in research in optoelectronic devices and received a Masters in Technology Management from UCD in 2006. He holds 5 patents and has published a number of papers.

Author's Latest Posts

Different Roles, Different Tools

By Tommy Mullane - 09 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 1

A question often posed is: does the use of tools and processes change as you go from block level to subsystem and chip level and as you add software to your system on chip (SoC)? And of course, the answer is that things change a lot. The primary differences between designing individual blocks and designing a big chip are that blocks tend to be designed by individual engineers or very small g... » read more

Remotely Performing IC Validation

By Tommy Mullane - 20 May, 2020 - Comments: 0

One of the key stages in designing any chip is the testing you do when you get the first silicon back. This is where you finally see the results of all your careful work and determine whether the chip is performing as designed, and as simulation told you it would. This is known as IC validation. The focus of validation is on functional test – checking that the chip in silicon meets the origin... » read more

Choosing The Right Level Of Programmability

By Tommy Mullane - 12 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

Designers prefer to design in flexibility. The reasons are legion and mostly obvious: you may not know today how a chip will be used tomorrow – best to delay setting anything in concrete until you are sure how it is going to be used. You may not fully understand the design until it is nearing completion, and premature optimization can leave you in a difficult situation. And there are more pra... » read more