category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Revisiting Moore’s Law
By Ed Sperling - 09 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

Moore’s Law was predicted to end at 1 micron. It was predicted to die off twice by Gordon Moore himself. And it has vacillated between 18 and 24 months on at least a couple of occasions since it was first introduced in 1965. From a technology perspective, there is no reason to assume it will ever die. It has gone from microns to nanometers and it can continue well into the picometer range.... » read more

India’s Impact
By Ed Sperling - 03 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

India’s great power outage, already being labeled “The Great Blackout,” left more than 600 million people in the dark. What’s more, it could well be repeated in the future. There are multiple forces that led to this collapse. One is political. A cap on energy prices and limited resources to power generating stations has limited the amount of investment that can be made in the power g... » read more

Opportunity Lost
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

The more software that gets written by hardware companies, the more they understand just how large the gulf has grown between the hardware and software mindsets. In part this is a cultural issue. Software and hardware engineers have different tools, different goals and different mindsets. But to an even bigger extent, it’s a legacy issue. And unlike hardware, legacy in software can begin a... » read more

Getting Paid For Efficiency
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

Over the past couple of years the electronics industry has woken up to the fact that saving energy and prolonging battery life is a very good thing. It can be marketed, used as a differentiator, and companies can charge a premium for battery-saving technology. In high-end devices, the incremental cost of adding even additional processors tends to get buried. In extremely price-sensitive mar... » read more

New Challenges, New Name
By Ed Sperling - 14 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

As you’ll notice today, we’ve changed our name from Low Power Engineering to Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering. We don’t take name changes lightly—we've been discussing this in depth with readers, sponsors, and researchers for the past six months. The almost universal conclusion is there is a big shift underway in the semiconductor industry today, and our new logo is a better refle... » read more

Time To Talk
By Ed Sperling - 08 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

A topic that surfaced repeatedly at DAC in multiple meetings, on panels, and over morning (and afternoon) coffee was the rapid increase in the size of software engineering teams. There are more software engineers than hardware engineers inside many chip companies these days, and they’re still not addressing an essential problem. While software teams do an incredible job of ironing out func... » read more

Technology Crossover Ahead
By Ed Sperling - 18 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

The attention showered upon NVM Express these days by both Synopsys (verification IP) and Cadence (subsystem) is significant. It’s the first significant opening in the enterprise computing space to emerge in years, and this is a market in which efficiency and performance are both measured and fully recognized. While SoC developers in the mobile space continue to develop power-management ca... » read more

Little Shifts, Big Changes
By Ed Sperling - 10 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

Every decade or so changes come along in IC design that look evolutionary, but which pack a wallop of side effects—some good, some bad, some challenging. But the next few process nodes, while evolutionary in many respects, changes will drive us deep into the realm of physics and mathematics. Research is already well under way in these areas. TunnelFETs use electrons to literally tunnel thr... » read more

What Needs To Be Fixed
By Ed Sperling - 20 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

Some incredible engineering feats at the nano level—particularly below 40nm—are making their way into production chips. Even creating a sub-micron chip in the first place is a testament to the advances in semiconductor engineering. Turning off large sections of the chip and implementing techniques such as voltage and frequency scaling, power gating, multiple voltage rails and islands, multi... » read more

Finite Math
By Ed Sperling - 13 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

In his keynote speech at the Mentor User-To-User conference yesterday, Sameer Halepete, Nvidia’s vice president of LSI engineering, made a very interesting point. At all levels of computing, from smartphones to the data center, the power budget is fixed, and the old ways of addressing it aren’t working. What that means is that there will not be a single solution to reducing power. It ca... » read more

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