category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Deja Vu All Over Again
By Ed Sperling - 27 Jan, 2011 - Comments: 0

Every now and then you get the feeling you’ve been here before, and with technology this is a persistent theme. Virtualization looks remarkably similar to time sharing, which is what most engineers in their 40s and 50s used when they were in college. And 3D stacking, particularly the 2.5D version, looks eerily like the old MCM, aka multi-chip module. There’s nothing wrong with resurre... » read more

Moore’s Law Will Never End
By Ed Sperling - 17 Dec, 2010 - Comments: 0

Moore’s Law has been many things to many people. It has been a statement of physical limits and an economic formula. It has been the cause of overheating and complex power solutions, and it has been a competitive weapon among companies looking to boost performance and cut costs. It also has been revised on more than one occasion as the time frame in which the number of transistors doubles ... » read more

Troubles At 15nm
By Ed Sperling - 16 Dec, 2010 - Comments: 0

For the better part of the past decade the most advanced companies and the big foundries were targeting 22nm as the bogeyman of chip development. Now it appears the big problems will crop up at 15nm. That means two things. First, the problems that were expected to crop up at 22nm—leakage, electromigration, electrostatic discharge, layout and even verification—appear to have been pushed o... » read more

Changes Ahead
By Ed Sperling - 18 Nov, 2010 - Comments: 0

With 3D stacked die looking increasingly promising, the question for much of the industry is exactly when this will happen, how it will happen, and what it will mean to the design process. To a large extent, in an attempt to buffer the risk, much of the fabless industry has been heading toward FPGA prototypes. It is uncertain whether that trend will continue at the same pace as 3D processes ... » read more

ARM’s Race
By Ed Sperling - 05 Nov, 2010 - Comments: 0

Prior to the Synopsys acquisition of Virage Logic, Synopsys seemed to have an almost exclusive relationship with ARM. Since then, Cadence and Mentor Graphics have both been cutting deals with ARM for support of its IP cores. What’s changed? With regard to the Virage Logic acquisition, very little. Synopsys did acquire the ARC processor through that deal, but ARC had been much more focused ... » read more

Talking Heads
By Ed Sperling - 21 Oct, 2010 - Comments: 0

The use of more third-party IP inside SoCs coupled with problems encountered at advanced process nodes is turning up some interesting challenges—and pointing the industry in some interesting directions. It’s a well-known fact that third-party IP isn’t always used as it was intended. Even internally developed IP isn’t always used as prescribed. It’s not unusual for chip developers t... » read more

Turn Up The Heat
By Ed Sperling - 15 Oct, 2010 - Comments: 0

For the better part of two years talk of 3D stacking has been filled with concerns about thermal issues. If you stack logic on logic or memory on memory or CPU on CPU, the chance of causing a fatal failure in the circuitry was assumed to be very high. It turns out that may not be the case after all. Companies working with early prototypes of 3D stacks say silicon itself may be one of the bes... » read more

Diverging Worlds
By Ed Sperling - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

The big surprise at the GPU Technology Conference this year, spearheaded by Nvidia, isn’t that GPUs are getting faster or that they can do amazing things. It’s that so little attention has been paid to the volume platforms that people carry around in their pockets. What has always been interesting about GPUs is they are the one platform where software can be truly parallelized and accele... » read more

Storm Before The Calm
By Ed Sperling - 17 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

The announcements out of ARM and Intel over the past couple week—and presumably from rivals AMD, MIPS and even Nvidia in coming weeks—are more than just a struggle for one-upmanship. The goal is much more far-reaching and the stakes are significantly higher than who has the fastest processor or core or even the lowest-power version. In the past year there has been a massive push to expan... » read more

Betting On 3D
By Ed Sperling - 26 Aug, 2010 - Comments: 0

The continuation of Moore’s Law appears less in doubt than ever. Companies such as Intel, ST, AMD (via GlobalFoundries) and IBM are testing FinFETS and ETSOI and work is being done on the back end to ensure that these new structures can be manufactured with sufficient yield. What’s changed, though, is the resistance by other companies to the progression of Moore’s Law. There is no long... » read more

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