category: Everything Low Power

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Constraints On The Electricity Grid
By Paul McLellan - 10 Mar, 2022 - Comments: 3

I recently wrote about Moss Landing, the biggest grid battery storage operation in the world. I discovered from talking to a friend recently that most people have no idea what constraints the electricity grid operates under. I think most politicians are the same, and they assume that if we build enough windmills and solar panels then we can live in some sort of eco-nirvana. But that's not goin... » read more

CES 2022: In Person But Not Many People
By Paul McLellan - 13 Jan, 2022 - Comments: 0

CES was and is officially hybrid, with some events on-site in Las Vegas and some online. But many of the large exhibitors pulled out of attending in person (including Cadence, although we might be a big exhibitor at DAC but at CES we are tiny). A lot of the press seems to have stayed away in-person too. To be honest, a lot of the press has been gradually staying away for years since so much is ... » read more

Moving From AMBA ACE to CHI For Coherency
By Min Lei - 09 Dec, 2021 - Comments: 1

Introduced back in 2011, ACE (AXI Coherency Extensions) grew from the existing AXI protocol to satisfy the cache coherency maintenance demands of SoCs with multi core processors and shared caches in smart phones, mobile computers, and servers. It added new channels for cache communication, extra signals to allow new transaction for coherency support, and five state model for caches. AXI + A... » read more

New Glasses Target Aspects Of AR & VR
By Paul McLellan - 11 Nov, 2021 - Comments: 0

Despite all the recent noise about the Metaverse (and Facebook changing its company name to Meta), I remain convinced that augmented reality (AR) is going to be more important than virtual reality (VR), at least in the medium term. For one thing, virtual reality headsets are large and expensive, at least today. I'm also not convinced that we all want to live in a virtual world like that...but I... » read more

Multi-DRAM Memory Subsystems In SoCs
By Shyam Sharma - 14 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

Even with DRAM capacity going up with each generation of DRAM, the demand for memory densities by a variety of applications is growing at an even faster rate. To support these high memory densities and bus width requirements (that are typically more than what a single DRAM can support), almost all the new generation of memory subsystems and SoCs have multiple DRAM dies combined to effectively c... » read more

The Next Generation Of General-Purpose Compute At Hot Chips
By Paul McLellan - 09 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 0

At the recent HOT CHIPS, the first day opened with the chips that you first think of when you hear the word processor. These are the next generation of chips from the likes of Intel, AMD, and IBM. There were lots of other chips too, such as Arm's Neoverse N2, and NVIDIA's new data-processing unit (DPU), or AMD's next-generation graphics architecture. But for this post, anyway, I'm going to focu... » read more

What Is Intern Reading Club?
By John Chawner - 12 Aug, 2021 - Comments: 0

As the summer winds down, interns are busy completing their assigned projects and preparing their end of summer presentations. These presentations have been a rite of passage for interns on the Pointwise team for many years and gives each intern a chance to show off what they learned and accomplished. And the rest of the team gets to hear all the details of what they've been working on. Anothe... » read more

Hyperconnectivity’s Impact On Consumers
By Paul McLellan - 08 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 0

Do you know what hyperconnectivity is? It is already affecting you, whether you know it or not. Hyperscalers are the companies like AWS, Google, and Microsoft that build and run those enormous (aka hyperscale) data centers. If you are a designer and use the cloud, then you have at least a vague idea of what data centers are being used to handle your design. But even if you are the generic perso... » read more

Modernizing Audio Codec Industry Standards For Enhanced Power Savings And Performance
By Raj Pawate - 13 May, 2021 - Comments: 0

Mobile phones have become a necessity, and we all use them to talk, play, communicate, and manage many aspects of our lives. While you may have an iPhone, your friends might have an Android phone  from one of several vendors. They all look and feel different, yet you can seamlessly talk with your friends. How is that possible? While they are different in some ways, they are similar in many oth... » read more

National Security And Artificial Intelligence
By Paul McLellan - 08 Apr, 2021 - Comments: 0

The (U.S.) National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recently published its final report. The report is 756 pages long, so I am not going to claim that I've read it all. I read the introduction and some of the conclusion, and the chapter on microelectronics (basically, semiconductors and advanced packaging). To give you a flavor, here are the opening paragraphs of the "Letter f... » read more

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