Thermal And Power Considerations In Designing For The Developing World


Engineers designing for emerging markets confront fascinating challenges. Take data centers for developing societies. Most of these systems are in remote locations, exposed to the elements, with limited power, save for the sun. How do you deal with rain, rust, durability? How do you prevent members of the animal kingdom sauntering by and chewing on your system? These are some of the intri... » read more

How To Speed Up Networking Design Verification


The enormous growth of the Internet of things (IoT) has an enormous impact on network providers. After all, without the underlying network infrastructure, there would be no IoT. One consequence has been a significant increase in the number of Ethernet ports on networking devices. Today, Ethernet switches and routers reach 256 ports (by year’s end that number will increase to 1024 ports), a... » read more

Shift In Focus For Low Power Design


The increased levels of interest we have seen over the last couple of years in system-level power modeling and energy-aware system-level design methodology, coupled with broad participation in the associated industry standard activities around system level power, gives us a clear indication that a shift in focus for low-power design is taking place. Our attempts to deliver energy-efficient high... » read more

Performance Analysis On Dark Silicon


It’s one thing to do performance analysis on the ‘light’ parts of an SoC design, but what about when most of the silicon is ‘dark?’ Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer at Mentor Graphics stressed that modeling the effects of turning on and off sections of the silicon is an important part of creating an accurate representation of the system. “Our models support state-based... » read more

Tackling RF Desense Challenges At The Source


Just imagine you are stepping out of the electronics store with your brand new smart phone. You eagerly scroll down your contacts to dial your best friend and proudly tell them the great news, but as soon as they pick up, your reception is gone! What happened? This problem is commonly described as desense, a degradation of the sensitivity of the receiver due to external noise sources. Desens... » read more

Using Automotive-Ready IP To Accelerate SoC Development


IP suppliers play a key role in the automotive supply chain to enable high-performance advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) SoCs. Vision-based SoCs may contain a high amount of third-party IP to implement the key embedded vision, sensor fusion, multimedia, security and advanced connectivity functions. And while IP suppliers have permeated the semiconductor ecosystem for consumer, mobile, PC... » read more

What To Do With Power Models


Ask any design engineer if they want a power model, and you can guess the answer. As far as what they want to use it for, the answer will vary. When I asked Jem Davies, ARM Fellow, if OEM engineering teams want a comprehensive power model, he said, “Ideally, yes. Perfectly ideally, what they would like to have from us is a model of each individual block of our IP which plugs together in a ... » read more

Think IoT Designs Are Challenging? Try Embedded Systems In The Brain


There’s low power and then there’s low power. There are amazing applications and then there are amazing applications. Today the bleeding edge of low power design is not so much in IoT (although excellent work is being done in that space) but in medical, where the stakes are high and possible outcomes life-altering. Chet Moritz, associate professor with the University of Washington’s... » read more

How To Fix Common Power Problems


As the industry moves to ever more advanced technology nodes, managing power has emerged as a primary challenge in modern SoC design. With smaller nodes, the wires become taller and narrower, which increases the resistivity and leads to more pronounced voltage drop effects. Electro-migration effects are also more severe at advanced nodes, causing serious reliability concerns. Both RTL synthesis... » read more

Doing More With RTL Power Analysis: Smart Synthesis Architecture


Traditionally RTL power analysis has been used to understand the design power consumption so that package and power supply designs can start, and designers can then fix any power regression violations in subsequent design iterations. However, migration to finFET processes is causing designers to look at RTL power analysis differently at advanced nodes. FinFET processes have largely addressed... » read more

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