Design For Silicon Success At 7nm


Next-generation automotive, mobile and high-performance computing applications demand the use of 7nm SoCs to deliver greater functionality and higher performance at much lower power. According to Gartner, when compared to 16nm/14nm technology, 7nm offers 35% speed improvement, 65% less power, and 3.3X density improvement. Hence, despite a whopping cost of $271M — per Gartner's estimate — to... » read more

Understanding Voltage Drop Mechanics


As a fundamental concept of electronic design, voltage drop ranks highly as one to understand well. I particularly appreciate when industry folks come up with creative ways to get the point across. Jerry Zhao, a product management director at Cadence and I were discussing how to best manage dynamic and static voltage drop, but I first asked him to explain the difference between the two. I p... » read more

The Efficiency Problem


The field of automotive automation has been the driver – so to speak – of the next leap of innovation in the field of transportation. Car architectures are being re-engineered to take advantage of incredible leaps in automation, using more powerful processors that process more data than ever before. The recent focus on autonomous automobile technology could be due to the ongoing drop in ... » read more

Understanding SerDes Signal Integrity Challenges


Signal integrity (SI) can perhaps best be defined as a set of measures of the quality of electrical signals, which are subject to the effects of noise, distortion and loss. Additional signal integrity issues include jitter, ringing, crosstalk, ground bounce and power supply noise. There are multiple factors that can negatively influence signal integrity, thereby causing errors and system fai... » read more

Creating Reliable SoCs For Safe ADAS Applications


Every major automaker is in the process of bringing out autonomous vehicles with ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems). In addition to processors and embedded software, ADAS requires a variety of sensors – ultrasonic, camera, RADAR (radio detection and ranging), LIDAR (light detection and ranging), GPS and IR (infrared) – that are used to recognize signs, people, animals, other vehicles... » read more

Working With Custom Checkers In Dynamic Simulation Of Low Power Designs


Power-aware simulators can provide a wide range of automated assertions in the form of dynamic sequence checkers that cover every possible PA dynamic verification scenario. However, design specific PA verification complexities may arise from adoption of one or a multiple of power dissipation reduction techniques, from a multitude of design features — like UPF strategies — as well as from ta... » read more

Rethinking Computing For The AI Age


Cisco estimates that global cloud IP traffic will nearly quadruple in the next five years. Information consumption is exploding with artificial intelligence (AI) embedded into all devices and experiences surrounding us. However, we do not want that to come at a cost of our security and privacy. Talk about pressure. On you. Today, much of computing is done in the cloud for things that you are... » read more

Why You Need ASIL Certified Processor IP For Automotive Safety Applications


As the electronics content in automotive safety-related systems continues to grow, there are also an increasing number of new entrants into the automotive semiconductor market. To achieve automotive safety certification, specialized hardware and software is required. With this competitive pressure and consumer demand for safer vehicles, it is more important than ever to focus on cost savings an... » read more

Smart Antennas Come Into View


Antennas are getting smarter, particularly in light of their increasing complexity, along with the intricacies of the environments — existing and new — they play in. There are interesting ways in which antennas are being integrated into the latest vehicles, some examples of which are in-vehicle approaches that range from a single antenna in the infotainment (behind the screen in front of... » read more

HBM2: It’s All About The PHY


HBM DRAM is currently used in graphics, high-performance computing (HPC), server, networking and client applications. HBM, says JEDEC HBM Task Group Chairman Barry Wagner, provides a “compelling solution” to reduce the IO power and memory footprint for the most demanding applications. Recent examples of second-generation HBM deployment include NVIDIA’s Quadro GP100 GPU which is paired wit... » read more

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