Week In Review: System-Level Design


Cadence rolled out a new version of its functional verification platform, greatly improving performance and updating it to deal with the big increases in third-party and re-used IP in designs. For IP and block verification, the company said it increased formal analysis performance by up to 20% and simulation by up to 10 times. The debugger also reduces the database size by 10 times and the time... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 15


Mentor’s Colin Walls digs into safety-critical sensors for cars, which are essential to the operation of a variety of systems in vehicles. The number of redundant sensors increases proportionate to the risk from failure, something that has been an accepted practice in mil/aero markets for years. Cadence’s Brian Fuller gazes into a crystal ball and concludes that while the semiconductor i... » read more

EDA And IP Revenue Up Again


The EDA and IP market showed continued growth again in Q3 of 2013, according to just-released statistics from the EDA Consortium. Total revenue was $1.729 billion, up 6.8% from the $1.619 billion reported in the same period in 2012. Wally Rhines, board sponsor for EDAC’s Market Statistics Service and chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, said the numbers showed stability and growth, but no ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 14


MoS2 FETs Two-dimensional materials are gaining steam in the R&D labs. The 2D materials include graphene, boron nitride (BN) and the transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). One TMD, molybdenum diselenide (MoS2), is an attractive material for use in future field-effect transistors (FETs). MoS2 has several properties, including a non-zero band gap, atomic scale thickness and pristine int... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 14


Disorderly conduct With a significant ability to store power per a given weight, lithium batteries have been a major focus of research to enable use in everything from portable electronics to electric cars and now researchers at MIT and Brookhaven National Laboratory have found the use of disordered materials – generally considered unsuitable for batteries – can be used in a new avenue for... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 14


Fastest organic transistor Research teams from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Stanford University have worked together to produce what they believe are the world’s fastest thin-film organic transistors, proving that this experimental technology has the potential to achieve the performance needed for high-resolution television screens and similar electronic devices. The researchers sa... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing And Design


Crucial.com reveals a surprising way to gain more time for improving one's personal health: fix a slow computer. A nationwide survey revealed that U.S. adults think they waste an average of 16 minutes per day waiting for their computer to load or boot up. Equating to two hours each week and four days per year lost to the wiles of a slow computer, it's no surprise that 66% of Americans say that ... » read more

The Week In Review: System-Level Design


Cadence won a deal with Fraunhofer, which licensed its MPEG codecs for Tensilica HiFi DSP. (Cadence acquired Tensilica last year.) The AAC codecs combine speech and general-purpose audio into a unified system, which simplifies design because it works at any bit rate. Sonics won a deal with MediaTek, which licensed its NoC technology for an upcoming line of SoCs. MediaTek, based in Taiwan, is... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 8


How do you choose an embedded operating system—and do you even need one? Mentor’s Colin Walls looks at the options, and the reason why there are no simple answers. Cadence’s Richard Goering has evidence that Facebook is gaining in popularity for engineer. He’s not the first person to recognize this shift, but the big unanswered questions are, ‘What’s the average age of those use... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 7


Vanadium’s wonders Already prized for its extraordinary ability to change size, shape and physical identity, vanadium dioxide can now add muscle power to its attributes, researchers with Berkeley Lab reported. They have demonstrated a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from vanadium dioxide that for its size is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle, able to catapult... » read more

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