Heart Of A Champion


The National Football League’s (NFL) pre-season games begin on August 2. To many of us, players in the NFL represent the toughest of the tough, combining size, speed and strength. But before we invest all of our expendable income on the game-worn jerseys of rifle-armed quarterbacks or the next “megatron” wide receivers, consider the accomplishments of those NFL players who have excelled i... » read more

Putting “Design” Back Into Design For Test In PCB Products


Design for manufacturing (DFM) has become a proactive part of the design process, but the same cannot be said for DFT. Whereas “left-shifting” DFM has reduced manufacturing problems, increased yield, reduced scrap levels, and simplified engineering rework, testability-related improvements have stayed flat during that same time. Unfortunately, as assembly costs have come down, and test-relat... » read more

Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulation, Testing


Embedded electronics are showing up nearly everywhere these days, in cars, smart appliances, medical devices—even fighter jets. Making sure those real-time embedded systems will work correctly is the aim of hardware-in-the-loop simulation and testing, which puts the systems through their paces in a virtual environment. In effect, HIL simulation adds a mathematical representation of all fun... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tools Applied Materials has launched a suite of products that will enable cobalt metallization schemes for contacts and interconnects in chips at advanced nodes. The products from Applied enable a complete cobalt fill process. The tools include CMP, CVD, PVD and RTP systems. At advanced nodes, cobalt promises to reduce unwanted resistance in the critical parts of a chip. Cobalt is bein... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Finance CyberInt raised $18 million in new funding led by Viola Growth and including existing investors. The company provides cybersecurity detection and response services. CyberInt has offices in Israel, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Panama. San Diego-based Kneron, which provides artificial intelligence technology for edge devices, received $18 million in Series A1 funding l... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Synopsys added machine learning capabilities to its Design Platform. The company highlighted benefits to the PrimeTime signoff tool, which saw 5X faster power recovery in customer designs at leading-edge geometries. Renesas is using the tool, noting a 4X power ECO speed-up. ArterisIP unveiled a standalone last level cache (LLC) for high-performance SoCs. CodaCache can be adde... » read more

The Long Pause


Carmakers are leaping over each other to roll out cars that meet SAE Level 3 requirements, whereby under some conditions drivers can let go of the steering wheel. Getting to Level 5 will take a lot longer, and there is some debate about where and even whether Level 4 will ever happen (see Fig. 1). Fig. 1: Levels of autonomy. Source: Auto Alliance There are two big gaps that need to be a... » read more

Hardware Acceleration With eFPGAs


If integrating an embedded FPGA (eFPGA) into your ASIC or SoC design strikes you as odd, it shouldn’t. ICs have been absorbing almost every component on a circuit board for decades, starting with transistors, resistors, and capacitors –– then progressing to gates, ALUs, microprocessors, and memories. FPGAs are simply one more useful component in the tool box, available for decades and ... » read more

Architects: How To Get The Most Out Of eFPGA


At Flex Logix, we are working with customers with a wide range of applications: MCU, IoT, SoC, Networking, Wireless Base Station, Communications, Data Center, AI, Vision, Signal Processing and Aerospace. Their needs and their situations are all very different, but we have noticed some common learnings across the range of applications as people learn how to use eFPGA. 1. Use as little eFPGA a... » read more

Don’t Be The Dinosaur On IP Reuse


In today’s competitive marketplace, IP assets are becoming more critical and strategic than ever before. There is a general understanding among all design companies that one needs to invest and reuse IPs within the enterprise for faster realization of an IP sub-system or an SoCs. Unfortunately, from the start most companies have failed to adopt the processes for developing and reusing their I... » read more

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