Blog Review: Sept. 2

Arm’s Pranay Prabhat highlights research into zero-power or low-power sensing devices and work toward designing a microcontroller that could fit with DARPA N-ZERO sensors.

Mentor’s Shivani Joshi provides a primer on the ODB++ standard data exchange file format that generates PCB design data files for use in fabrication, assembly, and test.

Cadence’s Paul McLellan shares some highlights from Hot Chips with details on some of the new processors for servers and laptops from Intel, IBM, Marvell, and AMD.

A Synopsys writer traces the evolution of television from HDTV at 720p resolution to today’s massive 7680×4320, or 8k Ultra HD, screens and how HDMI has kept up.

SEMI’s Serena Brischetto chats with Dimitrios Damianos and Chenmeijing Liang of Yole Développement about trends in the MEMS and imaging sensors market, the impact of COVID-19, and the role they play in fighting it.

Ansys’ Kaitlin Tyler considers the challenging environment educators in material science and engineering have ahead for the school year when labs and hands-on courses are a large part of learning.

Plus, check out the featured blogs from last week’s Systems & Design newsletter:

Editor in Chief Ed Sperling observes that not everything needs blazing-fast performance, but some things do.

Technology Editor Brian Bailey observes that the problem of terminology is getting worse, with marketing and technological change taking some of the blame.

Vtool’s Hagai Arbel describes using the inherent human capacity of analyzing and processing visual data to reduce the chance of bugs.

Cadence’s Frank Schirrmeister digs into how data center design has changed in key ways over the past decade, driving a reshuffling of the value chain.

Codasip’s Roddy Urquhart cautions that while PPA numbers sound nice, a single benchmark may not tell the whole story.

Imagination’s Gerry Raptis outlines the challenges in keeping a GPU occupied with optimal utilization while paring back if the framerate target is hit.

Aldec’s Sunil Sahoo summarizes why combining external and internal synthesis in a tool chain results in improved control and integration with a complete verification flow.

Synopsys’ Kevin Brand sees that finding the proper tradeoffs is a major challenge for EV manufacturers and that the difficulty of building bench rigs makes virtual prototypes even more useful.

Mentor’s Greg Curtis and YuLing Lin explain why RF designs pose a highly specific set of design and verification challenges, with particular focus on techniques addressing the time and frequency domains to accurately predict silicon behavior.

OneSpin’s Rob van Blommestein highlights how to ensure avionic computing systems satisfy DO-254 using coverage-driven verification.

Imagination’s Bryce Johnstone explains why remote control will be a critical link between ADAS and autonomous vehicles.

Coventor’s Sandy Wen provides a primer on wafer-level packaging and the technologies used alongside it.