China Tops Top500


The last time I wrote about the Green500, the Chinese machine Tianhe-2 was at the top of the Top500 list. At that point, Tianhe-2 had slipped from 49th to 64th on the Green500. Tianhe-2 has now slipped to second place on the Top500, only surpassed by yet another new Chinese machine, NRCPC’s Sunway TaihuLight. There has also been some consolidation between the Top500 and the Green500 lists: it... » read more

Building Smart Homes On A Secure Foundation


News outlets recently covered the new paper, “Security Analysis of Emerging Smart Home Applications,” and its findings about the security vulnerabilities in common “smart home” applications. Originally published in the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the paper describes the operation of, and potential issues with, the programming framework in smart home devices on the marke... » read more

Simulation To Protect Us


I hate to say I told you so, but, I told you so. Back in 2011, I wrote this article, Cell Phone Radiation: Taboo Topic, Interesting Science, and have since kept my eyes open for proof of what I’ve feared for some time now: that our bodies may be adversely affected by the radiation emitted by everything from the myriad electronic devices we carry close to our heads and bodies to WiFi hotspo... » read more

The Secret to Reaching Rapid Verification Closure


Every design team is looking to reduce RTL verification time in order to meet aggressive schedules. Successful teams have moved their level of design abstraction up to the C++ or [gettech id="31018" comment="SystemC"] level and employ [getkc id="105" comment="high-level synthesis"] (HLS) within their design flow. By taking advantage of this high-level description, these teams also plug into int... » read more

How Do We Get To Full Throttle In Mobile?


By Govind Wathan and Brian Fuller With each new generation of mobile device, we look forward to running the latest apps—especially games. (It's amazing how immersive mobile games have become in just a few years). We’re consumers but we’re also engineers, and here we’re faced with a huge challenge. It’s not just the games that get more powerful. A whole new generation of virtual ... » read more

Pivot Is The New Watchword For Design Automation


Design Automation has been a crucial part of the semiconductor industry for more than 30 years. Without it, keeping up with Moore’s Law would have been impossible. The Design Automation industry accepted the high-risk responsibility for developing the sophisticated software and algorithms at the pace necessary to corral Moore’s Law. In a sense, Design Automation had its own Moore’s la... » read more

It’s All About The Data


Ah, the wonders of math and physics — they do make the world go ‘round, do they not? And even in the world of chip design, of course, it is the fundamental understanding of the physics of electricity, materials, metals, etc., that it is all possible. I just wanted to stop for a moment to marvel at how those fundamental understandings of the math and physics of things have been abstracted... » read more

Save Power And Area By Eliminating Redundant Resets


Resets initialize hardware by forcing it into a known state, either on design start up or to recover from an error. In today’s SoC designs, it is not uncommon to see designs with millions of registers that have resets. Unfortunately, many of these resets are redundant. Leaving these unnecessary register resets in the design leads to increased power consumption, excess area, and routing conges... » read more

Is Low Power Coverage Achievable?


Back in 2005, yes, before the invention of the iPhone, I made a slide to educate users on what to cover in Low Power Verification. Using a simple 3 island test case, I illustrated that verification had to be done in 4 states of operation, with 8 transitions and 16 sequences to be verified. This is after pruning the theoretically possible set of 8 states for on/off voltage islands. More than ... » read more

Evolving LTE Brings New Era Of Connectivity To IoT


The Internet of Things is here and ramping deployment today, but there’s still considerable work underway to optimize many aspects of the network. Not the least of this are the access technologies that exist or are emerging to enable the ‘last mile’ connectivity for IoT connected objects. Wireless access broadly fits into two main areas: licensed band and unlicensed band. Short-range unli... » read more

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