The Future Of Embedded Monitoring, Part 1


Shall I compare thee to a…Rolls Royce jet engine? ‘There is a new era dawning whereby deeply embedded sensing within all technology will bring about great benefit for the reliability and performance of semiconductor-based products.’ These were my words during a presentation to an industry audience in China back in September 2015. During that same presentation, somewhat to the consterna... » read more

AI: A Perfect Solution But At What Cost?


The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has been a great enabler for the Internet of things (IoT). Given the ability to think for itself, it’s shrugged off its original definition as a network of tiny sensors and grown to incorporate a host of more intelligent AIoT (AI+IoT) devices, from smartphones all the way up to autonomous vehicles. AI has also paved the way for new IoT device... » read more

Brighter Future For Photonics


Photons increasingly are taking over where electrons are failing in communications, but mixing the two never has been easy. There always have been two potential implementation paths — building each on its own substrate and then stacking them, or building them on a single substrate. The tradeoff between the two solutions is more complex than it may initially appear, and ongoing improvements... » read more

The MCU Dilemma


The humble microcontroller is getting squeezed on all sides. While most of the semiconductor industry has been able to take advantage of Moore's Law, the MCU market has faltered because flash memory does not scale beyond 40nm. At the same time, new capabilities such as voice activation and richer sensor networks are requiring inference engines to be integrated for some markets. In others, re... » read more

Interconnect Inductance Extraction For Analog And RF IC Designs


Increasing operating frequencies for analog/RF designs mean interconnect inductance parasitic extraction is now required to ensure accurate circuit performance and high reliability. Automated field solver-based inductance extraction of both self and mutual parasitics enables IC companies to deliver analog/RF chips that provide the intended level of performance and reliability. To read more, ... » read more

Redefining Analog Fault Simulation For Automotive Functional Safety And Test Coverage Analysis


The growth in safety-critical applications has ushered in a paradigm shift in automotive IC functional safety and test coverage analysis. The increased need for safety, low defect rate, and long-term reliability is driving automotive IC designers to augment expert judgment with systematic fault simulation, to ensure a high degree of confidence in their analysis and to comply with the stringent ... » read more

Changes In AI SoCs


Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at ArterisIP, talks about the tradeoffs in AI SoCs, which range from power and performance to flexibility, depending on whether processing elements are highly specific or more general, and the need for more modeling of both hardware and software together. » read more

PCI Express 5 vs. 4: What’s New?


What’s new about PCI Express 5 (PCIe 5)? The latest PCI Express standard, PCIe 5, represents a doubling of speed over the PCIe 4.0 specifications. We’re talking about 32 Gigatransfers per second (GT/s) vs. 16GT/s, with an aggregate x16 link bandwidth of almost 128 Gigabytes per second (GBps). This speed boost is needed to support a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) and ma... » read more

The Four Benefits of Simulation-Driven Design


Simulation-driven design involves using simulation early, often, and throughout the design cycle to make better informed decisions, explore more alternatives and verify performance. This report presents the business benefits of taking a simulation-driven design approach, enabled by engineers, across the design cycle. It focuses on the four core sources of value for simulation-driven design: inc... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 12


Complexity is growing by process node, by end application, and in each design. The latest crop of blogs points to just how many dependencies and uncertainties exist today, and what the entire supply chain is doing about them. Mentor's Shivani Joshi digs into various types of constraints in PCBs. Cadence's Neelabh Singh examines the complexities of verifying a lane adapter state machine in... » read more

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