Where SoCs Don’t Go


By Pallab Chatterjee The National Association of Broadcaster show is the one place where you can be sure to find some of the most advanced technology on the planet—the kind of stuff used to broadcast, capture and edit 3D content. But while the market for this kind of technology is growing, the quantities of like products are still not high enough to warrant ASICs. It’s a world dominated... » read more

A Delicate Balancing Act


ver since the patent for complementary metal oxide semiconductors was awarded to Frank Wanlass at Fairchild in 1967, CMOS has proved to be one of the most durable technologies in electronics history. It has powered devices worth trillions of dollars in sales, been the recipient of an estimated $600 billion in R&D, and become the basis of some of the most refined manufacturing processes in h... » read more

Getting To Market Faster


By Jack Harding IP reusability has been a drumbeat in the semiconductor industry for a dozen years or more. The thesis is simple: Why build again what you already have? And with most durable, simple statements, the foundation is profundity. The basic need has yielded breakthrough innovation from IP companies large and small. EDA methodologies to “assemble” blocks from pre-existing inven... » read more

Why Your iPhone Battery Doesn’t Last


By Jon McDonald The other day a friend asked about the battery life on my iPhone. I love the phone by the way; he was disappointed with how often he had to recharge his. I responded with the one thing I had tried—turn off the Bluetooth. With that one change I have been pretty happy with the time between charges. His question got me thinking about the battery life of the phone, and I start... » read more

Field Solvers To The Rescue


By Pallab Chatterjee Field solvers have always been part of the Parasitic Extraction (PEX) world, but due to their long run times and complexity in configuration, their role was relegated to the setup/reference table generation for the pattern based 1-D and 2-D RC extraction tools. That’s about to change. Mentor, in combination with STMicroelectronics, one of it customers, said that at ... » read more

Rounding Up Design Corners


By Pallab Chatterjee With advanced process development occupying the 32nm to 22nm corridor, production SoC and ASIC designs are being built at the 180nm to 45nm nodes. In these processes, the designer has to contend with cross-wafer variation and non-correlated design corners, as well as multiple operation states. This is referred to as multi-corner multi-mode (MCMM) and variation analysis. ... » read more

Integrated IP Goes Vertical


By Ed Sperling The consolidation of intellectual property from small developers to large players with integrated IP blocks is accelerating. Large IP companies are now developing integrated suites that are pre-tested for specific vertical markets, and new companies are sprouting up to make it easier to put even broader collections of IP together in meaningful ways. It’s difficult to te... » read more

Emulation 2010


By Ann Steffora Mutschler In an industry that was once fraught with patent infringement lawsuits, hostile takeovers and other exciting corporate warfare, the hardware-assisted emulation market has quieted down considerably. That doesn’t mean it has lost its luster, though. It still plays an integral, if not ever-increasing and expanding, role in the verification efforts of most semiconductor... » read more

Slow Adoption for ESL


By Brian Fuller It’s been more than a decade since electronic system level (ESL) abstraction started to gain traction in EDA. It’s been more than a few years since the industry began to plan for the day when the benefits of embracing C-language approaches to design description and validation would find designers churning out massively complex and profitable designs while sitting in lawn ch... » read more

What Went Wrong At Toyota?


There’s been a lot of speculation about what caused Toyotas in general, and the Prius in particular, to suddenly accelerate. All across the electronics industry, this is big news because of the amount of electronics that now sits inside an automobile. The most advanced cars have complicated networks of processors, memory, logic, and basically everything that’s already built into the most... » read more

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