Is Your IP-Verification Environment Trying To Kill You?


I was watching an old episode of The Office the other night. It was the one where a GPS guided the lead characters into a lake. While we've all fallen victim to a GPS gone bad. Most of us are fortunate enough not to trust technology blindly enough to drive into a lake (or in my case, onto the tarmac at Ft. Lauderdale International). Yet, it's surprisingly easy to find parallels in real life whe... » read more

How I Survived CES


To come away from the annual Consumer Electronics Show with a shred of sanity, you need to focus on what matters. It’s easy not to. The minute you step foot into the crush of any exhibit floor you’re dragged into a massive undertow of technology that’s hard to swim from. The hype is palpable, the noise deafening, the products endless. Because of this sensory overload, it’s easy to la... » read more

(Low) Power Predictions 2015


Happy New Year! As we step into the New Year, lots of exciting things are already underway. First of all, the Internet of Things (IoT) is shaping up in a big way as witnessed at CES last week. Advances in devices that can talk to each other and share information are becoming a reality. Automotive applications, medical devices, industry automation, energy distribution and entertainment are all a... » read more

CES: THE Must-See Auto Show?


Power is such a huge concern for the automotive sector these days, it was not too much of a surprise to hear from Atrenta CTO Bernard Murphy that while at CES, he heard many folks suggesting that the experience that can only be called ‘CES’ may be the new must-see auto show. He observed that car companies are paying attention to surveys showing that a significant percentage of buyers vi... » read more

IGBT Power Cycling And Lifetime Testing


I have never been very good at introducing topics. During my presentations, I either jump directly into the subject matter, or start with a joke. My mom always said I could be a stand-up comedian. I prefer to sit. Oddly, that led me to becoming an engineer. And while this introduction does not lead me any closer to my actual topic, I presume some people rolled their eyes back and crossed their ... » read more

A Survey Of Our Low Power Blogs In 2014


Over the past year, we have written a number of blogs on low power IC design. Here at the end of 2014 approaches, let’s look back at what we have discussed Our blogs covered methods to estimate and reduce power consumption in digital ICs. Our recommendation is that you do this early in the design cycle, such as the RTL coding stage, when you can have the most positive impact. In the first... » read more

New Machine Tops The Green500 List


The Green500 has released its latest list of the top 500 most energy efficient Supercomputers and there is a new machine, L-CSC from the Helmholtz Center that is the first supercomputer to surpass the 5 GigaFLOPS/watt barrier. The machine is yet another heterogeneous system and is based on AMD FirePro S9150 GPU accelerators and Intel Xeon E5-2690v2 10C 3GHz processors. IBM and NVIDIA aren’... » read more

Building A Better Customized Debug And Trace Solution For Multi-Core SoCs


If you think of debug as solving a murder case through the use of backward reasoning, then trace is the video surveillance that helps pinpoint the culprit. Trace is invaluable as it provides real-time visibility into errors, and dramatically cuts down on design cycles and iterations. A recent study done by Cambridge University found that the global cost of software debugging has risen to the... » read more

IP Power Models Enable Energy-Aware System-Level Design


Energy efficiency is one of the primary design metrics for heterogeneous multi-core mobile platforms, and the very real threat of dark silicon reinforces the fact that we must manage energy consumption in these platforms intelligently. The way in which a platform is used absolutely determines how much energy it consumes, so we need to take a holistic approach to energy management. Furthermo... » read more

Electronic System Design In 2015: Busting Through Bottlenecks


It’s December, and that means it’s time to review what just happened in electronics design in the hopes that it will help light a path into the New Year. To simplify a year’s work in a global, sophisticated, ever-changing industry, you could say 2014 hinged on to two main tipping points: The marriage of EDA and IP was consummated. The road to the future forked. Let’s look at #1... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →