Lead or Follow?


Like it or not, governments are going to be dictating energy policies in the very near future.   The scenario will start unfolding at the data center, make its way down to the device level, and ultimately land at the system level. At the chip design level, the situation will be particularly bad. For one thing, communication from the top never makes its way all the way down the food chain w... » read more

Why Some Tools Stick Around


Getting people to change tools or developing environments is like pulling teeth out of a sleeping crocodile. It’s difficult in the best of circumstances, and dangerous at worst.   The problem seems to be one of stubborn attachment coupled with an investment in training that most companies are unwilling to write off. We’ve seen this problem before, and it’s tough to make it go away. ... » read more

Financial Pressures Meet Chip Development


Decisions about what kinds of chips will be developed are changing, and not for the usual reasons. While there have always been technological challenges in developing semiconductors—many companies believed that 1 micron was the wall—business decisions are entering into the picture at a level never seen before. Some companies are running their chips for two process nodes instead of one—... » read more

What they don’t know…


  AMD’s spinoff of its fabs with a big cash infusion from investors in the United Arab Emirates is an indication of just how rotten things have become in the processor manufacturing business. AMD spent decades trailing one step behind Intel. When it finally caught up several years ago, using low-power as a selling point and bragging about better performance, Intel roared back to life a... » read more

Economic Bailout Meets Design


What does the economic bailout have to do with system-level design? Probably more than you’d guess. Convergence of the front and back end of chip design, combining everything from software with verification planning at the architectural level, is now being converged with one other element—business. And that business element is reaching far deeper than ever before. Business has always ha... » read more

What Else Can You Cram On A Chip?


Gordon Moore should be proud. At every process node, the number of transistors goes up, but so do the number of engineers you need to develop a chip. This may not be immediately obvious to anyone who’s actually working on a new chip. You’re probably part of a team that uses fewer engineers than several years ago, purchasing off-the-shelf IP blocks, and leaning heavily on design automatio... » read more

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