category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

A Different Kind Of Bottleneck
By Ed Sperling - 07 Sep, 2013 - Comments: 0

Electronics have always lived in troubling times. There have been threats of outsourcing, not to mention re-outsourcing from the outsourcers, constant pressure from startups from around the globe, pricing pressures, government intervention, technological issues, and rising complexity that is now forcing a complete re-thinking of the supply chain. More recently, the demand has been for mobility,... » read more

Performance Or Power?
By Ed Sperling - 06 Sep, 2013 - Comments: 0

For high-volume chips, such as those slated for mobile devices such as tablets or smart phones, energy efficiency is absolutely critical. For very high-value chips, which are the ones that show up in PCs or servers, the focus is more on performance and how efficiently that performance is obtained. And for the stuff in the middle, notably the Internet of things, the commodity servers and automot... » read more

Solar In Context
By Ed Sperling - 08 Aug, 2013 - Comments: 0

What made Apple’s iPod a winner was business context. There were plenty of other MP3 players on the market and Apple’s wasn’t particularly noteworthy from a technology standpoint. But rather than just sell another portable music machine, the company created something its competitors didn’t have—iTunes. In fact, it was iTunes that made the iPod, not the other way around. The same th... » read more

Next Phase Of Energy Efficiency Begins
By Ed Sperling - 02 Aug, 2013 - Comments: 0

Individual purchases and product rollouts by companies are difficult to assess by themselves. Sometimes they are isolated steps that have no context or connection to anything else—the proverbial toe-dipping exercise to see just how deep and cold the water is. Other times, they are the beginning of a huge market shift. In the mobile space—and increasingly in everything that mobile devices... » read more

Intel Vs. Everyone Else
By Ed Sperling - 08 Jul, 2013 - Comments: 0

A report from ABI Research is starting to gain some attention. For cynics, the question of why now seems perfectly reasonable, considering the report was released early last month and promptly fell well under the semiconductor industry’s radar. But cynicism aside, it’s still interesting to compare specs for chips using ARM’s Cortex-A15, A9 and Qualcomm’s ARM-based Krait. The bottom ... » read more

Pushing The Limits
By Ed Sperling - 13 Jun, 2013 - Comments: 0

Ever since the turn of the millennium, researchers have been warning that wires and interconnects will have issues. Electron crashes were reported as early as 2001, and electromigration is rising to the forefront of problems at advanced nodes. The result? Chipmakers are looking at thicker wires for the first time as a way of dealing with resistance and capacitance issues. While this makes se... » read more

Big Iron Conundrums
By Ed Sperling - 24 May, 2013 - Comments: 0

Enormous attention is being focused on energy efficiency in mobile devices because time between charges trumps a slight boost in performance. Inside of data centers those benefits are far less clear. While energy costs remain a huge factor—they are a visible part of the bottom line costs for a CIO—how to reduce those costs is anything but a simple equation. Just adding more energy-saving... » read more

Moving Targets
By Ed Sperling - 16 May, 2013 - Comments: 0

There is a very close correlation between power and complexity in an SoC. The more functionality that is required to meet market demands, the greater the need to push to the next process node in order to fit it all onto a single die. The result is more power density, and more attempts to limit the effects of that density with power islands, different voltages, gating, and a variety of other tec... » read more

The Power Problem
By Ed Sperling - 09 May, 2013 - Comments: 0

For the past few years, EDA companies have been warning chipmakers that power will become the biggest issue they face at future nodes. They were right. While it may not be the only big problem—after all, the number of issues at each new tick of Moore’s Law is growing—power is certainly one of the most challenging and by far the most pervasive. In fact, the warnings about just how perni... » read more

Machine Talk
By Ed Sperling - 03 May, 2013 - Comments: 0

The Internet of Things raises some interesting questions that have never been fully addressed in semiconductor design. For instance, how do you assess the necessary performance for any particular thing? And how long is another thing willing to wait for information to be passed along? These sound like fairly basic engineering questions—until you consider that the Internet of Things is actua... » read more

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