Connectivity Key To Growing MCU Market


“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an MCU without connectivity, must be in want of a Wi-Fi.” A picture paints a thousand words and for ambitious companies with microcontroller unit (MCU) technology, the picture below is very clear – market growth in IoT-oriented connected devices offers great opportunities. In a slow-growing market, each new design win requires the removal... » read more

Developing 4K Video Projects With FPGAs


Achieving higher resolution is a never-ending race for camera, TV and display manufacturers. After the emergence of 4K ultra high definition (Ultra HD) imaging in the market, it became the main standard for today’s multimedia products. 4K Ultra HD brings us bigger screens which give an immersive feeling. With this standard, the pixilation problem was solved in the big screens. 4K consumers ar... » read more

AI, Performance, Power, Safety Shine Spotlight On Last-Level Cache


Memory limitations to performance, always important in modern systems, have become an especially significant concern in automotive safety-critical applications making use of AI methods. On one hand, detecting and reporting a potential collision or other safety problem has to be very fast. Any corrective action is constrained by physics and has to be taken well in advance to avoid the problem. ... » read more

Physical Verification For Photonics Integrated Circuits


Silicon photonics is a promising solution for the explosive growth of data volume and network traffic in computing and communications. Silicon photonics integrates photonics applications on a silicon wafer, utilizing mainstream Si-based technology. Photonics integrated circuits (PIC) offer several advantages over traditional integrated circuits: faster data transfer speeds, lower power consumpt... » read more

Making Sense Of EDA And Digital Twins


There is a new buzzword in town, “digital twins.” I have been using it for a while now in the context of system-on-chip (SoC) verification as well as a little more broadly when it comes to security issues for data in general. There are some differences in emphasis across different vertical domains, based on when they are used during the life cycle, which use models are desired and what scop... » read more

GapFree Processor Verification


Not so long ago, many semiconductor and system suppliers developed their own processors, often with unique features geared toward specific target applications. Although this innovation has continued for specialty processors such as digital signal-processing (DSP) engines and graphics processing units (GPUs), central processing units (CPUs) largely turned into a two-contestant race between x86 a... » read more

EDA In The Cloud


Interest in the use of third-party public clouds in conjunction with electronic design automation (EDA) applications has never been higher. Back in February, Ed Sperling and I did a video interview (embedded below) to discuss EDA and cloud computing. This article follows up on that interview, providing some additional insight into why and how the integrated circuit (IC) industry reached this po... » read more

Setting Up RISC-V Implementation Verification


This blog provides an overview of STING’s release mode of operation. STING design verification tool is released to the end user in the form of a self extracting script. The script can be used to install the release package in user’s environment. Once the package is installed, the user needs to set few environment variables before the STING executable can be built. The release package ... » read more

Multitasking For Modern GPUs


Originally GPUs were all about one thing, 3D graphics, and specifically fill-rate. Creating 3D triangles, calculating their position, coloring them in, processing the right ones (thank you tile-based deferred rending), and outputting them to the screen. Nowadays GPUs need to do more – it’s called “compute.” Indeed, we’ve been talking about running this on low-power GPUs for a long ... » read more

Is There Finally A Silver Bullet For Software?


As I am in Nuremberg for the annual embedded world conference, the overall mood here seemed a bit muted and slow on day one. There are rumors of 200 exhibitors of the roughly 1100 having pulled out due to the global health situation—we are all asked not to shake hands and smile instead—and the rainy weather doesn't help much either. With the weather turning to snow on day two, the attendanc... » read more

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