Balancing Power And Test


The International Test Conference will be held at the Disneyland resort hotel in Anaheim, Calif., from Nov. 4-9. One of the biggest concerns for the test engineering community is to account for the impact on test quality due to additional power management techniques implemented in deep submicron designs. Elaborate power management strategies, such as voltage scaling, clock gating or power-ga... » read more

Tales From The Road


By Mike Gianfagna We recently held a SpyGlass Power “boot camp” at Atrenta San Jose. We brought in 15 of our best and brightest field AEs from all over the world and discussed the very latest techniques for advanced power optimization. When you get a group of folks like this together in one room, the learning typically goes both ways. The “students” (the FAEs) certainly learn a lot ... » read more

RTL Power Reduction Triathlon


Unless you’ve just come out of a week-long coma, you’ve been watching at least part of the Olympic Games in London. The years of training, the drama of competition, the thrill of victory… (you know the rest). Some contests come down to the smallest of margins to define who wins gold. The recent women’s triathlon is one such case. After a 500-meter swim, a 43-kilometer bike ride and a 10... » read more

Looking for a Sure Thing


By Mike Gianfagna Have you ever walked into a new car showroom and been told by the sales person that all cars were sold “as-is,” with no warranty? I doubt anyone would buy a car at a place like that. High-end cars can have more than 80 distinct electronic control systems on-board, each powered by various SoCs. And each of those SoCs contains many IP blocks sourced from multiple suppliers.... » read more

Low Power Everywhere


By Kiran Vittal School is over for my kids and the summer holidays are here. We are planning to make minor modifications to our home, which includes installation of recessed lights. LED light bulbs are all over the place in home appliance stores and they claim 85% savings in energy costs with a life span of 50,000 hours. The cost of these LED bulbs is five to six times the cost of your average... » read more

Standards: Too Many or Not Enough?


Many of you are familiar with the Betamax versus VHS format wars in the late 1980s. If you’re not old enough to remember that one, you’ll remember HD DVD versus Blu-ray. In each of these cases, there was a clear winner. Semiconductor design has these format wars, too. The problem is that there is rarely a clear winner and worse, sometimes we miss the standard altogether. There are tw... » read more

Whac-A-Mole Anyone?


By Mike Gianfagna It started as an arcade game in 1976 (according to Wikipedia), so it’s been around for a while—longer than system-on-chip (SoC) design for sure. It’s essentially a game of futility. A mole pops up and you whack it down with a hammer, only to have another mole pop up elsewhere. Figuratively, you fix one problem and another one pops up. So what does all this have to do wi... » read more

Way, Way Beyond CES


By Tiffany Sparks This month, the eyes of the electronics industry were literally and figuratively on the Consumer Electronics Show. Reports put attendance for CES at upwards of 150,000 people. Just to put that figure in perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to the entire population of cities like Springfield, Mass., or Sioux Falls, S.D. (according to Wikipedia). And that’s actually large... » read more

After The Ball Drops


Growing up in New York City leaves lasting memories. The coming holiday season evokes some strong ones. The Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center is an example. Christmas always seemed to radiate in all directions from that huge tree perched above the ice skating rink behind Radio City Music Hall. And then there was the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. For the most part, New Yo... » read more

Buzzwords: Dead or Alive?


By Tiffany Sparks “Time-to-market” and “time-to-volume” – are they overused marketing buzzwords? Until recently, I would have argued yes. After all, it seems like very few solutions in the semiconductor supply chain are not marketed along the lines of addressing time-to-volume or time-to-market challenges. But just because buzzwords become trite, it doesn’t mean they aren’t st... » read more

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