Blog Review: Nov. 18

Between anomalies in ancient Egyptian pyramids and algae genetically engineered to attack cancer cells, Ansys’ Bill Vandermark covers a wide array of the sciences in his top five picks for the week. Plus, Disney says being a human antenna could have its advantages.

Don’t write the epitaph for Moore’s Law just yet, says Mentor’s Michael White. He takes a look at the technical and business challenges of sub-20nm nodes – and how in spite of them, a surprising large number of companies are making the jump.

The CAN bus should be worried, says Cadence’s Paul McLellan: automotive Ethernet is on the rise, and it may be the only way all the electronic control units in modern cars can be tied together.

After using Synopsys’ Hybrid Prototyping for an early firmware/software development platform, multimedia IC company Sunplus took the stage at SNUG Taiwan to discuss its implementation. Michael Posner gives an overview of the presentation.

From whacking a dummy with a baseball bat for industrial safety to connected dice to wrist-bound dev boards, ARM’s Philippe Bressy picks out his highlights among the exhibits in a walk around the mbed Zone at TechCon.

If you have ever attempted to verify memory sub-systems, you may have encountered the same problem that verification blogger Tudor Timi faced. He wanted to translate from abstract memory burst accesses to bus transactions and got to wondering exactly how many ways there were to transfer 16 bytes.

Strong hardware-based crypto needs to be accompanied by an equally robust software security layer, according to Rambus’ Paul Kocher in an ARM TechCon panel on securing the IoT.

Ever wondered if you can determine the junction temperature (Tj) of a MOSFET from its case temperature (Tcase)? NXP’s Christopher Hill conducts experiments to come up with a non-intuitive result.

Plus, check out last week’s featured blogs in our Low Power-High Performance newsletter:

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling contends that even with industry consolidation, the robustness of the ecosystem is worth more than any single company.

Executive Editor Ann Steffora Mutschler observes that when it comes to making tradeoffs, the choice of configurable core can provide a huge range of scalability options.

Mentor Graphics’ Abishek Ranjan, Saurabh Shrimal and Sanjiv Narayan team up to explain what needs to be considered in power exploration in finFET-based designs.

Ansys’ Calvin Chew examines new requirements for today’s SoCs.

ARM’s Kinjal Dave looks at how to bring 64-bit computing to entry-level mobile devices.