System Bits: Aug. 30


Probing photon-electron interactions According to Rice University researchers, where light and matter intersect, the world illuminates; where they interact so strongly that they become one, they illuminate a world of new physics. Here, the team is closing in on a way to create a new condensed matter state in which all the electrons in a material act as one by manipulating them with light and a... » read more

Context Is Everything


With consumer and industrial IoT applications, the importance of system context to IC vendors is paramount. No more are the days of developing a chip in isolation; close partnership with systems companies is de rigueur as they provide the use case data that is foundational to development of systems that work. While this makes sense in a smartphone, it’s significantly harder to achieve in a... » read more

Embedded Evolution


The design of embedded systems has changed drastically from the days when I was directly involved with them. My first job after leaving college was to design aircraft control systems. I had the dubious honor to be working on the first civilian fly-by-wire aircraft – the Airbus A310. The reason I say dubious is that we had so many eyes trained on us, and that system contained so much redundanc... » read more

The Future of UVM


It’s time for a frank discussion on the future of [gettech id="31055" comment="UVM"]. Given how UVM usage has grown and the number of teams that rely on it, I think this conversation has been a long time coming. Is continuing to use UVM the right thing to do? Do we have hard evidence that supports our continued usage of UVM? Do we actually benefit from it or do we just think we benefit? ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A The FTC has given the go-ahead to ON Semiconductor's acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor. As part of the requirements, ON Semiconductor had to divest its planar insulated gate bipolar transistor business, which will be sold to Littelfuse. (Littelfuse will also pick up the transient voltage suppression diode and switching thyristor product lines for a combined $104 million in cash.... » read more

Surprises At Hot Chips 2016


Who would have thought an Intel architect would be on stage talking about cutting pennies out of MCU prices? Or that Nvidia would be trumpeting an automotive SoC whose chief performance advantages come from the integration of ARM CPUs that can support up to eight virtual machines? Or that Samsung would be developing a quad-core mobile processor from scratch based on its own unique architecture?... » read more

Customizable Apps – Avoiding The Pitfalls Of EDA Frameworks


For those of us involved with EDA tools in the late '80s and early '90s, the word “frameworks” brings back memories of rigid methodology and use models, coupled with CAD complexity. Cadence and Mentor, among others, proposed the EDA framework as a mechanism to provide design revision management coupled with tool flow control (I can already imagine your eyes glazing over). For some situat... » read more

How the Internet of Things Drives More Diverse Design Considerations


Last week I was in Taiwan, presenting at and attending CDNLive. It is always great to see the local progress. MediaTek presented on their adoption of Perspec System Verifier, highlighting how they increased throughput of test generation from 1 to 100 test cases per hour. Realtek reported on their use of JasperGold technology, as well as on their Palladium adoption, achieving between 30x to 50x ... » read more

All You Need Is Cache (Coherency) To Scale Next-Gen SoC Performance


Life on the SoC performance front remains a withering battle sometimes, because things can seem fairly bleak. As transistor scaling becomes more expensive below 10-nanometer feature sizes, every day it becomes harder to double performance every 18-months or so and stay competitive. Nowhere is the pain of this battle more acute than in consumer and automotive systems, where low cost is the key t... » read more

New Ways To Scale Performance


Immense amounts of data are being collected today in areas such as meteorology, geology, astronomy, quantum physics, fluid dynamics, and pharmaceutical research. Exascale computing (the execution of a billion billion floating point operations, or exaFLOPs, per second) is the target that many HPC systems aspire to over the next 5 to 10 years. In addition, advances in data analytics and areas su... » read more

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