System Bits: Oct. 29


Coupling photons with electrons With the potential to lead to the creation of materials whose electronic properties could be “tuned” in real time simply by shining precise laser beams at them, researchers at MIT have produced and measured a coupling of photons and electrons on the surface of an unusual type of material called a topological insulator. This type of coupling had been predicte... » read more

Week In Review: System-Level Design


Mentor Graphics unveiled an embedded hypervisor for automotive infotainment systems. This is a Type 1 hypervisor, meaning it runs next to the metal and below the OS. In contrast, Type 2 hypervisors run above the OS. Mentor’s hypervisor supports multicore processors and ARM’s TrustZone security. Synopsys rolled out Ethernet controller IP for the data center, focused on energy efficiency a... » read more

Uncertainty Increases About What’s Next


Across the semiconductor industry, there is a lot of talk about what’s next. Lithography advances have stalled, NRE and mask costs are rising, and complexity is exploding. But unlike the 1 micron wall, which was supposed to be impenetrable, there is no single issue holding back progress. Instead, there are lots of them, most with pricey workarounds, but which together become more complicat... » read more

New Pain And Inflection Points


Jack Harding, CEO of eSilicon, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the explosion in the costs and the risk of semiconductor designs at the leading edge of Moore's Law. [youtube vid=HLS5QhnGHfM] » read more

A Nobel Prize For Modeling And Simulation


This year, a Nobel Prize has been awarded for devising a computer model and simulation process. Bloomberg, which interviewed Marinda Wu by phone, said: “The models let us slow down…and let us look at them one piece at a time.” This enables them to optimize things. At this point you may be thinking one of three things. Either 1) I don’t remember that prize being awarded or, 2) at last ED... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of Verification


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of verification with Janick Bergeron, Synopsys fellow; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Mentor Graphics; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for the Cadence System Development Suite; Prakash Narain, president and CEO of Real Intent; and Yunshan Zhu, vice president of new technologies at Atrenta. What foll... » read more

Will History Repeat Itself?


Hands up — how many people read the books by Clayton Christensen, books such as The Innovator’s Dilemma? His books were talked about endlessly in the corridors of the EDA companies when they first came out. They all wanted to identify the next disruption and could find reasons why almost every new tool was going to be disruptive. For people not familiar with his work, his main premise wa... » read more

Buying And Selling EDA Companies


EDA, arguably more than any other industry, has been built on the backs of engineering breakthroughs by startups. In aggregate, those startups are the backbone of tools that have made cell phones smart and which helped improved gas mileage on automobiles. Through an almost continuous stream of acquisitions, these startups have added to the top-line valuation of big EDA companies, and despite th... » read more

Don’t Quit Your Hardware Job


At the recent Intel Developers Forum I was struck with the prevalence of software-defined architectures. Topics covered software-defined networking, software-defined storage, and the software-defined data center. It seemed that the concept of software-defined infrastructure was everywhere. It’s not unique to IDF, however. I suspect that at the upcoming ARM TechCon the trend will continue, but... » read more

CSR In Semis


For decades the largest industries in the world have deployed corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that, on their surface, are designed to “give back” or “share the wealth” with the communities that have produced the labor force that drive their collective success. We also are told that CSR is good business and can be correlated with improved branding and greater profitabil... » read more

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