category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

The Upside Of Glitches
By Ed Sperling - 22 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

There has always been a struggle between the verification and marketing sides of any chip company. The solution in the past has simply been to hire lots more verification engineers on a contract basis prior to tapeout and to muscle through the debug process. Creating a more generic platform and differentiating it with software changes that equation, and that is raising lots of concern behind... » read more

Behind The Scenes
By Ed Sperling - 01 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

This year’s DAC should be one of the more interesting shows in several years, although not for the usual reasons. As an industry, we are just emerging from one of the worst downturns in decades. It started in December 2007, and various segments of the overall economy will begin picking up at different times, depending upon whether they’re leading indicators or trailing indicators. Netb... » read more

Redefining ‘Good Enough’
By Ed Sperling - 24 Jun, 2010 - Comments: 0

The increasing amount of software content in devices and the ability to add fixes after tapeout is changing the definition of what’s considered a market-ready product. This is business as usual in the software world, where patches upon patches are considered routine. Service packs are a way of fixing problems when millions of lines of code interact with millions more lines of code in unan... » read more

The Unifying Promise Of 3D
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

There’s been a lot of talk about 3D stacking lately. Mention it to any EDA vendor and they have plans in place. Mention it to large chipmakers and they’re already experimenting with it. And mention it to those several nodes behind and they’re ready to jump. Critics are quick to point out that all of these groups may not be talking about exactly the same thing. Slapping together two chi... » read more

Same Industry, Different Shape
By Ed Sperling - 14 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

As the design industry plunges into DAC this year, it’s beginning to look like a completely different industry. It’s not the players themselves. There are still the Big Three EDA vendors, IP vendors and lots of startups. And it’s all still geared toward making chips. But the center of gravity has shifted from what was almost exclusively place and route and synthesis out to the edges of... » read more

A Delicate Balancing Act
By Ed Sperling - 22 Apr, 2010 - Comments: 0

ver since the patent for complementary metal oxide semiconductors was awarded to Frank Wanlass at Fairchild in 1967, CMOS has proved to be one of the most durable technologies in electronics history. It has powered devices worth trillions of dollars in sales, been the recipient of an estimated $600 billion in R&D, and become the basis of some of the most refined manufacturing processes in h... » read more

What Went Wrong At Toyota?
By Ed Sperling - 25 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

There’s been a lot of speculation about what caused Toyotas in general, and the Prius in particular, to suddenly accelerate. All across the electronics industry, this is big news because of the amount of electronics that now sits inside an automobile. The most advanced cars have complicated networks of processors, memory, logic, and basically everything that’s already built into the most... » read more

The Bright—And Much Larger—Future
By Ed Sperling - 01 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

The recent pushes by both Synopsys and Mentor into new markets should say something about the state of EDA. Being able to lay out the wires and subsystems on a chip, not to mention verifying that it all works, will always be vital to getting SoCs to tapeout. But that kind of work will not generate the kind of growth the big EDA companies are looking for—at least not without some major tweaks ... » read more

Road Construction Ahead
By Ed Sperling - 25 Feb, 2010 - Comments: 0

A long-running joke in Canada is there are only two seasons—winter and road repair. Dating back from the days of ancient times, roads have united empires. In a more figurative sense, they have made the best corporations better than their competitors. And on a conceptual level, they have linked together theories and concepts that previously had functioned in separate worlds. In SoC d... » read more

How Accurate Is Software?
By Ed Sperling - 19 Feb, 2010 - Comments: 0

The number of corner cases is growing. In hardware, that means more verification, more testing and more re-spins. But in software there is no comparable verification method. The Prius braking problem was blamed on a software glitch, but as Synopsys CEO Aart de Geus succinctly noted, none of Toyota’s rivals rushed out to trumpet their own software methodologies. While software adds flexib... » read more

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