Blog Review: Oct. 21

Ansys’ Bill Vandermark goes back to the future in this week’s top five picks. Plus, the star of the world’s longest hoverboard flight gets an upgrade. Perhaps the person riding it will be wearing an ocean-cleaning bikini.

Straight from MemCon 2015, Rambus’ Aharon Etengoff brings us a keynote exploring the increasingly blurred lines between memory and storage, and how an alternative paradigm could see compute offload to storage that is both data structure-aware and connected directly to a memory-like storage device.

Continuing with MemCon, Cadence’s Paul McLellan presents an overview of the memory industry and discusses the wall between memory and storage and what the industry is doing to slowly chip away at it.

The role for PDKs is expanding from the chip to the package. Mentor’s John Ferguson explains why they are even more complex when thinking about assembly design kits.

If you use Synopsys’ NVMe VIP, you’ll want to check out Eric Peterson’s tutorial on the basic layers and architecture of the VIP, plus an introductory overview of sending commands to the NVMe Controller.

ARM’s Brian Fuller sits down with Ali Tahmasebzadeh, one of the team behind the world’s first modular smart watch, for his thoughts on the inspiration, the design, the engineering challenges, and his vision for wearables.

Holiday festivities are nearing their peak in India, which Gaurav Jalan uses as an opportunity to think outside of the box and relate verification to the mythical wars where good had to increase its arsenal to prevail over evil.

How far can you go in a solar car? The World Solar Challenge is on in Australia, and NXP’s Martijn van der Linden chats with a team member from one car competing in the 3000km race from Darwin to Adelaide.

Lloyd Whitman, Randy Bryant, and Tom Kalil of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy present a grand challenge: Create a computer that can proactively interpret and learn from data, solve unfamiliar problems using what it has learned, and operate with the energy efficiency of the human brain.

If you’re considering a curved TV, take into account how far away you’ll be sitting, says Samsung’s Haksun Kim.

For more, check out the featured blogs from last week’s Low Power-High Performance newsletter:

Editor in Chief Ed Sperling contends that standards efforts will have to be expanded in the increasingly connected world.

Executive Editor Ann Steffora Mutschler argues that it’s not enough to look at power in a standalone way anymore.

ARM’s Brian Fuller looks at what happens when you combine the LEGO with crowdsourcing.

Synopsys’ Srikanth Jadcherla observes that in the IoT era we will have to start looking at power in reverse.

Mentor Graphics’ Nicolas Williams and Qi Jing offer some ideas about what to do when your familiar EDA tools aren’t working.

Ansys’ Norman Chang digs into how to efficiently and accurately calculate the temperature increase on millions of wires due to self-heat.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan points out that phones are never actually off, but that does mean they can’t be more efficient.