category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Crunch Time
By Ed Sperling - 05 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

Never have so many things conspired to make design so difficult—at least not at the same time. At the center of this cornucopia of challenges is power, because more functions and more things now have to fit into a power budget that remains fixed. While some components in a complex SoC may run at lower voltages, you can be assured that others will run hotter and at higher voltages—at leas... » read more

Enterprise Power
By Ed Sperling - 30 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

The corporate data center is getting a lot of attention these days. ARM is fighting for a place inside server racks. Cadence has rolled out IP for faster storage standards. And Mentor Graphics has just introduced middleware for embedded Linux. Why? Because unlike the mobile space, where you need billions of units to make margins, in the corporate enterprise you only need millions. Those extr... » read more

Picture Perfect
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

For the past five years power/energy efficiency has been a growing concern in the IC world, as well as in the OEM world that has to compete based on battery life. The days when you could plug a phone into the wall at night and be assured you could use it for three days or more without worrying about finding another plug ended with the advent of great displays and more functionality. Since th... » read more

Converge And Consolidate
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

Electronics has always been about convergence, and convergence inevitably spawns new companies while forcing consolidation of others. What used to be in a device moved to a board, from a board there has been a perpetual push to put things in a chip. At one point, circa 2000, analog companies claimed that mixed signal chips were a thing of the past and that there would be separate analog chip... » read more

Margin Call
By Ed Sperling - 03 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

Ever since Moore’s Law passed 65nm, the discussion has focused on power versus performance. Do you run a chip faster and hotter, or do you keep performance about the same from one chip to the next and improve battery life. At 28nm and beyond, there are other factors that begin to weigh into this discussion. One is reliability. Can a chip developed at the forefront of Moore’s Law be as re... » read more

Beyond Power, Performance And Area
By Ed Sperling - 06 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

For the past five decades, the tradeoffs in IC design have always been between power, performance and area. Performance dominated for most of the history of IC development—remember the MIPS and MHz/GHz wars—followed closely by area because of the need to cut costs. Over the past few years, power has moved from an afterthought to the front of the pack because of the emphasis on mobility ... » read more

Credit Deficit
By Ed Sperling - 09 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

One of the common complaints from around the semiconductor industry is that design teams don’t get recognized. Appreciation comes readily to brands such as Apple or Samsung, but it is several levels of abstraction removed from the companies that develop the processors, let alone the tools, materials, methodologies or processes that make those processors possible. Worse, energy efficiency ... » read more

The Power Of Analog
By Ed Sperling - 01 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

The shift into stacked die, expected to begin late next year with a big ramp in 2013, will shine a spotlight on analog design and its effect on power. For years, analog engineers have bragged about just how efficient their portion of a chip was versus digital. We’re about to find out if they’re right. Stacking die will, to a much greater extent, decouple analog from digital and leave it ... » read more

Commoditizing Green
By Ed Sperling - 03 Nov, 2011 - Comments: 0

Over the past five decades, Moore’s Law has been a powerful guiding principle for shrinking process geometries and improving performance. But with performance now considered secondary to energy and power efficiency, the same forces that have worked to commoditize performance increases while slashing costs will be applied to saving battery life and drawing less energy from the wall. This i... » read more

More Knobs To Turn
By Ed Sperling - 28 Oct, 2011 - Comments: 0

Some of the hardest stuff is already done when it comes to saving power. Many engineers are quite well versed in managing multiple power islands and designing with sometimes dozens of voltage rails. There has even been massive progress in controlling gate leakage through a variety of materials and now 3D structures. There also is much more that can be done to improve energy efficiency, rangi... » read more

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