Blog Review: May 25


By Ed Sperling Cadence’s Richard Goering follows Jim Hogan’s talk about the democratization of MEMS. This market is showing big gains lately, but to really release the emergency brake will require a different design approach. Mentor’s Robin Bornoff revs up the engine and turns on the neon underbody lighting in this look at the overclocking market, shifting effortlessly from cars to PC... » read more

Planning For Physical Effects


The importance of Intel’s announcement that it has perfected 3D transistors and will roll them out this year should not be understated. This is a major breakthrough technologically, with major implications for power, performance and even competitiveness. FinFETs have been the subject of some intensive research for more than a decade, with the University of California at Berkeley leading the c... » read more

‘What If’ In 3D


By Ed Sperling ‘What if’ questions have become standard across multiple pieces of the design chain for any SoC, but the number is multiplying at each new process node. When the industry begins moving to 2.5D and 3D over the next couple years, the number of tradeoffs will likely move from overwhelming to unmanageable. That will set in motion a number of efforts in semiconductor design. ... » read more

Mobile Applications Drive New Architectures


By Pallab Chatterjee The push toward mobility in consumer devices is having an impact on the entire component flow. Mobile devices are dominated by two key factors—an overriding power constraint and very high data bandwidth. The power constraints are on the mobile device side and on the cloud-based support server side. The high data bandwidth issues are due to the limited processing powe... » read more

EDA’s Big Challenge


By Ann Steffora Mutschler It is not news to anyone that the growth rate of the EDA industry has been less than impressive, to put it politely. Traditional EDA implementation tools have hit commodity status and something’s got to change. Thankfully, there are a host of challenges coming in the form of system-level (and higher) design, not to mention what will be required for true 3D chips. ... » read more

SoC Ecosystems Become More Tightly Integrated


By Ed Sperling SoC ecosystems are changing. Quality and focus are replacing volumes of names as companies that fund them begin to narrow down which partners add the most value and which markets they need to target. Establishing a ring of allies is nothing new, of course. IBM had its circle of most trusted software partners back in the 1970s when mainframes were the dominant computing platfo... » read more

The Multiple Faces Of Virtual Prototyping


Virtual prototyping conjures either confusion or relief, so it should come as no surprise that some chip designers are still confused about the different types of prototypes on the market. “Virtual prototyping is going through a change right now,” explained Gary Smith, founder and chief analyst for Gary Smith EDA. “Today, users are using cycle-based tools to prototype sections of their... » read more

IP Subsystems Are Nothing New


By Kurt Shuler I’ve been hearing the term “IP subsystem” lately, and it seems to be the latest newfangled buzz word in the SoC semiconductor and IP industry, second only to “virtualization.” Much of the context for this growing interest in IP subsystems has been inspired from the work of Rich Wawrzyniak in his Semico Research report, “IP Subsystems: The Next IP Market Paradigm - Oc... » read more

Dawn Of The M2M Age


By Jack Browne With the unrelenting progress of Moore’s Law, the semiconductor sector has enabled technology to power today’s cloud computing model. For 30 years, the industry has been talking about the convergence of computing, control and communication. But today, people are mostly intrigued by the end user experience for their devices and how to connect to the Internet of things. The... » read more

$23 For A Deli Sandwich?


By Jon McDonald I have talked to a number of people recently about the justification for investing in an ESL methodology. “What’s the ROI?” is a question I hear fairly often. I’m currently on vacation in New York City with my family, and during the trip I’ve realized just how subjective ROI can be. What’s the ROI on a $23 deli sandwich? At home I’d never think about paying tha... » read more

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