category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Business In The Time Of Influenza
By Ed Sperling - 29 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

The current round of flu will have lasting repercussions on the electronics industry, whether it turns into the kind of pandemic that killed 50 million to 100 million people in the fall of 1918 or whether it proves to be a localized tragedy. We won’t know that for months, of course. The 1918 flu actually began as a relatively mild illness the previous spring before mutating into one of the ... » read more

The Other Side Of Consolidation
By Ed Sperling - 23 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

Consolidation has begun again in the electronics industry, but so far the majority of it is happening at the customer level.   While this is a sign that the economy has bottomed out and credit is beginning to flow—as unevenly as it always does when a downturn bottoms out—it’s creating a rather disturbing trend. Fewer customers mean fewer designs, even though the complexity of the des... » read more

What If?
By Ed Sperling - 16 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

The latest terminology to permeate the ranks of systems engineers and the makers of automation tools is, ‘What If.’   On the face of it, this concept is a progression from the old matrix model, which provided a set of possible interactions and variables. What it adds, however, is an extra layer of dependencies and interdependencies, a concept that was developed largely in the software ... » read more

Pure Science, Plain And Simple
By Ed Sperling - 09 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

In a rather striking bit of irony, tools for creating semiconductors are able to use multicore architectures just fine. The problems these design tools are trying to solve can be parallelized to the point where simulations and models can be created in hours instead of weeks, or versus months in the case of Excel spreadsheets.   The real question, though, is whether the multicore designs th... » read more

What Happens When We Hit Bottom?
By Ed Sperling - 02 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

The economy appears to have hit bottom. This is good news, but there are caveats.   First of all, not all industries will recover at the same rate. Communications never fully recovered from the dot-com bubble. Anyone who bet big on a communications recovery has either switched careers or retired. Now it looks as if the auto industry will be dragging for some time, and companies that hitche... » read more

New Tools, New Economics
By Ed Sperling - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

The race is on to get new development tools out the door, and starting next month you’ll begin seeing many more of them.   Timing is everything, and these tools have to be ready for the next round of chip development—even if the chips aren’t being designed yet. But given that electronics design has to precede an industry recovery by 6 to 12 months, at the very least, and chips and ot... » read more

Everything Changes At 45nm
By Ed Sperling - 20 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

Design engineers are pretty good about sharing ideas with their colleagues. They’re extremely good about sharing the limelight with their peers. But they’re not particularly good about implementing new ideas and concepts and changing the way they work.   There are good reasons for this, of course. It takes a long time to become proficient at skills for designing new chips or creating a... » read more

A Leap Of Faith
By Ed Sperling - 12 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

Complexity isn’t always bad. The key is being able to deal with it intelligently and economically.   Systems engineers are in the middle of one of the most complex periods in chip development. In the past, they typically had to deal with one problem at a time. At 1 micron, the wall was lithography. At 90 nanometers, it was low-k dielectric insulation (and yes, copper interconnects and 30... » read more

The Downturn’s Impact On Startups
By Ed Sperling - 05 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

The strong get stronger in a downturn for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the outset of the slump.   First of all, contracts that are in place at the outset typically don’t get canceled—at least not at first, and frequently not at all. In the system-level design world, those contracts can last as long as 18 to 24 months. Even if the number of derivative chips is scaled back, ... » read more

Another Brick In The Wall
By Ed Sperling - 19 Feb, 2009 - Comments: 0

The wall is in sight.   Moore’s Law has propelled the semiconductor industry at an amazing velocity since it was first introduced in 1965, and despite some minor changes from 18 months to two years, we have pretty much stayed on course. In the past, most people thought we would hit the wall at 1 micron, and they thought it would happen again at 32nm. The road map appears pretty solid dow... » read more

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