Why Inductance Is Good for Area, Power and Performance


By Magdy Abadir and Yehea Ismail For chips designed at advanced technology nodes, interconnect is the dominant contributor towards delay, power consumption, and reliability. Major interconnects such as clock trees, power distribution networks and wide buses play a significant role in chip failure mechanisms such as jitter, noise coupling, power distribution droops, and electro-migration. ... » read more

Multiphysics Reliability Signoff For Next-Gen Auto Electronics Systems


The automotive industry is in the midst of a sea change. Growing market needs for electrification, connectivity on the go, advanced driver assistance systems, and ultimately the goal of autonomous driving, are creating newer requirements and greater challenges. A chassis on four wheels is now fitted with cameras, radar and other sensors, which will be the eyes of the driverless car, as well as ... » read more

Power Aware Intent And Structural Verification Of Low-Power Designs


Power aware static verification, more popularly known as PA-Static checks, is performed on designs that adopt certain power dissipation reduction techniques through the power intent or [gettech id="31044" t_name="UPF"]. The term static originates from verification tools and methodologies that applies a set of pre-defined power aware (PA) or multi-voltage (MV) rules based on the power requiremen... » read more

32GT/s PCI Express Design Considerations


Today’s networking and rapidly emerging artificial intelligence (AI) applications are requiring more bandwidth in accelerators and GPUs, as well as faster interconnects to transmit and receive greater amounts of data. Towards the middle of 2017 the PCI-SIG industry consortium announced its latest specification, PCIe 5.0, which raised the data rate from 16GT/s to 32GT/s and doubled the link... » read more

The Analog Design Gap


By Benjamin Prautsch and Torsten Reich Sensors are everywhere. In the context of Industry 4.0 and IoT, we face an ever-increasing demand for high-quality sensing. Data acquisition is fundamental to adaptive production chains. So aggregating data isn't just some nice-to-have feature. It is the basis of modern production systems. But don’t we have sensors already? Isn’t everything fine?... » read more

How AI Impacts Memory Systems


Throughout the 1980’s and early 1990’s computer systems were bottlenecked by relatively slow CPU performance, thereby limiting what applications could do. Driven by Moore’s Law, transistor counts increased significantly over the years, improving system performance and enabling exciting new computing possibilities. Although computing capabilities have advanced significantly in recen... » read more

Energy Requirements And Challenges For IoT Autonomous Intelligence At The Edge


Recently, on a cold February night at San Jose State University, I attended the fourth episode of the talk series IR4: The Cognitive Era. IR4 talks focus on the fourth Industrial Revolution that is currently taking place and how cognitive science affects education, careers, and life. This latest part involved four esteemed experts on cloud and edge computing and the ramifications of energy effi... » read more

By the Power Vested in Me, I Now Pronounce You (The SoC Designer)…


…Doomed. Well, maybe that’s a little harsh, but your job won’t be getting any easier; that “happily ever after” may be harder to achieve than you think, and there are a number of reasons why. And by “me” (of vested power), here I’m really talking about the power of the consumer market as a whole and our collective insatiable demand for newer, shinier…well, just plain “coo... » read more

Intelligence At The Edge Is Transforming Our World


Innovation comes in all forms in technology, from software and hardware to displays all the way to the human-machine interface. As devices and systems become more intelligent, the onus on humans to learn the machine’s ways is shifting. Until now, interaction with smart devices has largely relied on our ability to manipulate the machines; to learn their language to input and extract the inform... » read more

Heterogeneous Hubbub


It’s no secret that designers today would prefer not to be restricted in their architectural choices. And who can blame them? At the same time, this sentiment has boosted interest and usage of both heterogenous architectures as well as the RISC-V ISA. To support this, companies across the design, test and verification ecosystem are ramping efforts. One such effort is the teaming of UltraSo... » read more

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