Blog Review: Dec. 16

Power from nuclear fusion just made the leap from sci-fi to the real world in this week’s top five engineering tech picks by Ansys’ Bill Vandermark. Plus, stacking chips tall, helping gunshot victims survive, and a shoe just for you.

A world without paralysis? Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff takes a look at one research group’s latest advancement, a brain implant that allowed a paralyzed man to bypass his spinal injury and move his arm and hand.

Synopsys’ Narasimha Babu G V L, Udit Kumar and Anand Shirahatti present a primer on the complexities of PCI Express Spread Spectrum Clocking, the process by which the system clock is dithered in a controlled manner to reduce peak energy content, and its verification techniques.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan listens in on a talk between Jim Hogan and John Lee, GM & VP of the Apache business unit of ANSYS, about the wild ride and many startups that brought him there.

Mentor’s Colin Walls digs into where embedded software fits into modern systems in a video of his keynote speech from IP-SOC in Grenoble.

If you’re curious about VR, check out the blog by ARM’s Freddi Jeffries showing why the way our eyes focus can make it difficult for our brains to adjust to close-up VR screens and the technologies trying to create a better experience.

If you missed last week’s Low Power-High Performance newsletter, check out the featured blogs:

Editor in Chief Ed Sperling observes that it’s not technology that will hold back the next generations of chips.

Executive Editor Ann Steffora Mutschler argues that software is more of a determining factor for hardware than ever before.

Mentor Graphics’ Abhishek Ranjan, Saurabh Shrimal and Sanjiv Narayan team up to look at the techniques designers can use to explore and reduce power consumption.

Cadence’s Krishna Balachandran contends the golden age of low power has just begun.

Rambus’ Steven Woo finds old bottlenecks are shifting and new ones are forming.

Synopsys’ Rich Collins looks at how to achieve 32-bit processor performance with the energy consumption of an 8-bit core.

Ansys Apache’s Vic Kulklarni points out that with the IoT set to impact our lives for years to come, creative ways need to be found to participate.