Which Comes First?


The increasing numbers of software engineers inside of hardware companies, coupled with predictions about how the software stack will increase over time to include applications, has produced a lot of speculation about what the starting point should be for design. Will it remain the hardware? Or will it be the software? The answer, gleaned from literally dozens of interviews, is beginning to ... » read more

Roundtable: Bridging Hardware And Software


System-Level Design talks about where the problems are with hardware-software co-design and how much progress we've made with Narendra Konda of Nvidia, Frank Schirrmeister of Cadence, Shabtay Matalon of Mentor Graphics, Kurt Shuler of Arteris and Jack Greenbaum of Green HIlls Software. [youtube vid=EOUPsDOYGq8] » read more

High-End Audio Made Easy: The Software Story


Audio requirements are soaring. Whereas audio used to be done in a few spare cycles of the main CPU, decoding today’s Blu-ray Disc 24-bit, 192 kHz high-definition audio streams, or post-processing 9.1 channel Pro Logic IIz streams, requires significant performance. An obvious solution is to offload the processing to one or more dedicated audio digital signal processors (DSPs) such as the Desi... » read more

Power Benefits Of Modular Interconnect Design Using Network-On-Chip Technology


The system-on-chip (SoC) interconnect spans the entire floorplan of a chip and consumes a significant portion of the power. The interconnects of today’s SoCs are a distributed architecture of switches, buffers, firewalls, register slices, and clock and power domain crossings. One approach is to implement these units modularly with a simple, universal transport protocol between all units. This... » read more

Picking The Right Processor


By Frank Schirrmeister In an embedded system, the sole connection point between the software and the hardware is the processor. Somewhere right now the effort to develop software for a complex System-on-Chip (SoC) is surpassing the effort of developing the chip itself. As I pointed out in my recent description of the Design West conference in San Jose, complex ecosystems of related content, to... » read more

Experts At The Table: Designing At 28nm And Beyond


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to talk about design at future process nodes with Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for Cadence’s System Development Suite; Behrooz Zahiri, vice president of marketing at Magma (and currently director of marketing at Synopsys), and... » read more

Experts At The Table: Designing At 28nm And Beyond


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to talk about design at future process nodes with Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for Cadence’s System Development Suite; Behrooz, Zahiri, vice president of marketing at Magma (and currently director of marketing at Synopsys), an... » read more

Experts At The Table: Designing At 28nm And Beyond


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to talk about design at future process nodes with Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; Charles Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris; Frank Schirrmeister, group director of product marketing for Cadence’s System Development Suite; Behrooz, Zahiri, vice president of marketing at Magma (and currently director of marketing at Synopsys), an... » read more

Making Sense Of Virtualization


By Achim Nohl In the last month I’ve had the opportunity to get some hands-on experience with hardware virtualization and hypervisors. My knowledge so far on this has been mainly limited to what I could read about it and what other people are saying about it. However, the PowerPoint slides I’ve seen leave a lot of white fog between the bullet items. This didn’t make me feel very comfo... » read more

Managing Complexity With Advanced Packaging


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Engineering teams across the globe continue to pound the process geometry treadmill to stay on the curve of Dr. Moore to achieve better speed or lower power or smaller die—and it all adds up to increased complexity in the design and packaging. However, with advanced forms of die stacking such as package-on-package, silicon-in-package, 2.5D silicon interposer techno... » read more

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