Blog Review: Sept. 16

Ansys’ Justin Nescott presents five top engineering articles for the week. Being an amateur photography buff, I start salivating at a 250 megapixel camera. Plus, origami and the art of structural engineering and a football-playing robot.

Synopsys’ Michael Posner provides some shocking information about the buildup of static electricity and the impact it can have on 28nm designs.

Increasing the longevity, performance and quality of designs requires looking at many new issues according to Mentor’s Matthew Hogan who tries to provide an overview and resources for some of the less publicized effects.

Cadence’s Christine Young talks to Charles Qi about the increasing electronics content in automobiles and the migration to Ethernet-based communications and LPDDR4 memory interfaces.

Modern servers and data centers are out of synch with current demands, says Aharon Etengoff, with a look at a Rambus research program that aims to do something about that.

NXP’s Hillary Cain shares her reasons for wanting the new EMV-based credit cards along with eliminating $8.6 billion a year in fraud costs.

The mbed OS is now available for Beta testing, announces ARM’s Zach Shelby. Also to come over the next few weeks: mbed Device Connector Beta, mbed Client Beta, mbed Device Server 2.5, and mbed TLS 2.1.0.

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

Editor In Chief Ed Sperling contends there is no single solution for low power, but lots of little things can make a big difference.

Executive Editor Ann Steffora Mutschler digs into how to do ‘light’ vs. ‘dark’ silicon performance analysis.

Rambus’ Loren Shalinsky explains why bandwidth is so important in choosing memory.

ARM’s Brian Fuller looks at what you need to know to build a micro weather station.

Synopsys’ Alan Gibbons observes that UPF 3.0 means IP vendors no longer have to provide 57 varieties of power models.

Cadence’s Christine Young distills a speech by University of Toronto professor Farid Najm about what works best in power management.

Mentor Graphics’ Lauro Rizzatti finds that one of the consequences of the IoT is an increase in the number of Ethernet ports.