Looking Back To The Future


By Frank Ferro As I'm reading through year-end articles on the top technologies of 2011, along with predictions of what's hot for 2012, I naturally start to reflect on the emerging technologies for the year ahead—and will anyone see them coming? Undoubtedly this was another year where rapid technology adoption changed our behavior throughout the day. It was the year of the tablet, the sma... » read more

Pest Control


By Achim Nohl Identifying and describing power issues is tough, let alone trying to solve them. “Power” issues can be very diverse. It’s even more difficult to explain how virtual prototypes can help to analyze “power” consumption. We often approach it by introducing how power information can be reflected in virtual prototype models, but there are many different goals and conflicting... » read more

Make Vs. Buy


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The confounding ‘make versus buy’ decision is understandably muddled by design complexity. Millions of gates, thousands of blocks, dozens of cores, plus software, packaging, and worries about physical effects don’t make this decision any easier. In some cases the process can be simplified by mandating that anything that doesn’t add differentiation really is... » read more

Content And Gaming Drive Design


By Pallab Chatterjee This year’s IEDM conference will feature a non-device topic for the luncheon keynote from Masaaki Tsuruta, CTO of Sony on Interactive Gaming. The takeaway: Even in the heavy R&D and physics-centric world of devices, building for the end application has now become one of the top priorities in driving specifications. Traditional compute systems were based on batch-... » read more

Managing IP In Complex Devices


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Whether it is a smartphone, tablet, video game with home networking feature or any other digital device, each contains multiple subsystems with a mixture of IP blocks from either in-house development or licensed from third parties. Managing the subsystems, let alone the individual IP blocks and the interplay between all of them, is not getting any easier. In fact, wit... » read more

Build It Faster


By Ed Sperling Hitting market windows with IC designs has always been a struggle, but the race to the finish line is becoming more critical—and much more difficult. The reason: Market windows themselves are shrinking. Products that used to stick around for years may now only last for months, replaced by newer versions that offer either better performance or lower power. In many cases, par... » read more

Thinking Bigger


I am in Shanghai and Xi’an this week for the ICCAD event and numerous customer visits, and have had the opportunity to observe and reflect upon the drivers of change within our industry. Living in the United States, and specifically Silicon Valley, has given me a front-row seat to the technology business for well over a decade. But my first visit to mainland China has shown me how parochial a... » read more

A Secret Weapon


By John Bainbridge One of the major advances in SoC design methodologies more than a decade ago was the decoupling of the network-on-chip (NoC) from the individual IP cores throughout the SoC. This was (and is) accomplished through the use of carefully specified sockets such as OCP, the old VSIA VCI and (somewhat later) AMBA-AXI, which establish clear boundaries of communication responsibility... » read more

Dinner Talk


By Jon McDonald Recently at dinner we were discussing a new video game my son wanted. My wife and I were less than thrilled with the game due to some of the adult themes I had seen in the reviews. As my son was trying to convince us that it was an acceptable game he fell back on the old standard justification: “All my friends are playing it!” This is one of the poorest reasons for anyt... » read more

Mapping Out The Value Of TLM Modeling


I have written about the value of system-level design and moving up to next level of abstraction numerous times. This fall one of the most interesting steps of progress towards effective system-level design and emphasis on the importance of embedded software has been made by the two big FPGA vendors Altera and Xilinx. Both vendors have announced devices combining programmable logic of up to sev... » read more

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