category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

The Next Big Thing
By Ed Sperling - 04 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

One of the interesting things about boom markets in technology is that they’re almost always built on other technological developments. Typically what happens is technologies are combined into a new whole or system, which explains how the telegraph gave way to the telephone, and how radio became the basis for television. The computer age had its own set of building blocks that were used to... » read more

Making Things Better
By Ed Sperling - 20 Dec, 2012 - Comments: 0

For the better part of the past decade the focus in semiconductor design has been on improving energy efficiency—making batteries last longer and lowering the energy bills for data centers—and continuing to boost performance. The benefits of future engineering efforts may be less obvious. In fact, progress in the future may be measured more against improving what’s already there today ... » read more

Shades Of Gray
By Ed Sperling - 06 Dec, 2012 - Comments: 0

As more things talk to other things, and as we begin accumulating more devices that can communicate with other devices, one key question will begin surfacing in the power/performance arena—are we really better off than we were before? This is a deceptively simple, open-ended question with some very complex answers. But it’s also essential that we provide enough answers to satisfy critics... » read more

Remaking The Playing Field
By Ed Sperling - 30 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

Just a week ago the battle lines looked very well defined. ARM was fighting Intel on power, and Intel was fighting ARM on performance. One week later, ARM has cemented a deal with AMD, which will use its cores in future processors running Microsoft software. Imagination Technologies is buying MIPS, which presumably it will use to go after both ARM and Intel. And Intel has a stake in Imaginat... » read more

ARM Vs. Intel, Phase Two
By Ed Sperling - 07 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

From 60,000 feet, ARM’s TechCon and the Intel Developer Forum look remarkably similar. The key message from both is a focus on improving performance in processors while significantly lowering power. Intel wants a piece of the mobile market so badly it can taste it. And ARM, which is the primary processing engine inside of the iPhone and one of a couple in Android-based devices—MIPS has ... » read more

More Intelligent Standards
By Ed Sperling - 11 Oct, 2012 - Comments: 0

There is a lot of talk these days about holistic power intent. The terminology may sound new, but the underpinnings are not. This was the idea behind the Common Power Format, which was proposed by Cadence back in 2006, and the Unified Power Format (more recently known as IEEE 1801), which was introduced the following year. These ideas were forward-looking at the time. They grasped the growi... » read more

Looking Upstream
By Ed Sperling - 28 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

The majority of attention in energy efficiency is focused on consumer pain—how long a device can last between charges—but the real quantum leaps are happening further upstream these days. This is good news for a couple of reasons. First, it provides lots of opportunity for semiconductors in a market where pricing is much more elastic. Companies are willing to pay for energy savings, whic... » read more

Shrinking Power Budgets
By Ed Sperling - 27 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

While much of the electronics industry is coming to grips with maintaining power levels and trading that off with performance, most chips have largely lived within a fairly stable power budget. It certainly has gone down over the past decade, but not that drastically. There is certainly more functionality on chips, which makes it much harder to keep SoC power within a fixed number, but at least... » read more

Materials, Architectures And Gordon Moore
By Ed Sperling - 21 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

Shrinking features on bulk CMOS using planar transistors has turned the semiconductor industry from a startup industry to one of the most efficient and robust industries in the world. Each new process node increases the number of chips that can be cut out of a single wafer, literally defining economies of scale. Gordon Moore defined the direction, which certainly created a long list of chall... » read more

Speed Sells
By Ed Sperling - 13 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

The good news is that the new iPhone battery lasts at least as long as the old one. The bad news is that Apple hasn’t offered double battery life and equivalent performance as an option for mobile users that need extended times between charges. They’re not alone, of course. At the Intel Developer Forum this week, Intel Chief Product Officer Dadi Perlmutter talked about voice and gesture-... » read more

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