First Silicon At 14nm


By Ed Sperling The first 14nm test chips are beginning to roll out the door from foundries, and companies are beginning to trumpet their success. But before anyone pops the champagne corks, there are some caveats. First of all, what most people are billing as 14nm chips are actually mostly 20nm. They are readily willing to concede that point, settling on 16nm, but the reality is that it’s... » read more

All Things To All Customers


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Low-Power High-Performance Engineering recently spoke with Suresh Menon, VP of systems development at Lattice Semiconductor, about the challenges of directing the development of power-sensitive FPGAs from architectural decisions to identifying the target applications. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. LPHP: When you look at the products that Lattic... » read more

All Things To All Customers


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Low-Power High-Performance Engineering recently spoke with Suresh Menon, VP of systems development at Lattice Semiconductor, about the challenges of directing the development of power-sensitive FPGAs from architectural decisions to identifying the target applications. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. LPHP: When you look at the products that Lattic... » read more

Mix-And-Match Power Options


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Choices abound today when it comes to considering a node shrink. Fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) and finFET technologies along with other advanced transistor options are being evaluated, both together and independently of the other. It is possible to implement finFET on bulk 28nm CMOS or finFET on an FD-SOI process, for example. It is also possible to imp... » read more

Virtual IDM Progress Report


By Ed Sperling Complexity, tight power budgets, disaggregation of the supply chain and market fragmentation are conspiring to force much tighter partnerships among companies that develop different pieces of an SoC, as well as those that collaborate on even larger systems. This confluence of factors has forced the rules for how companies work together to be rewritten, but even within that frame... » read more

Chip Architect Challenges


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Product lifecycles can be shorter than the design cycle and even the process development cycle, particularly in the consumer handheld device market. It’s up to the chip architect to decide how the functions should be implemented. The good news is there are a number of options available, ranging from mapping the design to 2.5D technology, moving to finFET tr... » read more

Spoiled By Moore’s Law


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Over the past 20 years, lithium ion has emerged as the predominant battery technology. While there are a few variants, it seems that for everything from smartphones to automobiles, the same basic technology is being used. Many other technologies that have come and gone over the years—nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride come to mind in the recent past, but they ar... » read more

More Art Than Science


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Not so long ago, high-end digital devices were mostly just digital. Today large SoCs contain a significant amount of analog/mixed-signal content. And given that analog circuits have certain sensitivities different from digital blocks, there is a desire to convert some of those analog signals to digital to achieve power savings and take advantage of digital verificat... » read more

The Growing Integration Challenge


By Ed Sperling As the number of processors and the amount of memory and IP on a chip continues to skyrocket, so does the challenge for integrating all of this stuff on a single die—or even multiple dies in the same package. There are a number of reasons why it’s getting more difficult to make all of these IP blocks work together. First of all, nothing ever stands still in design. As a r... » read more

Power Impacts On Advanced Node IP


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the move to the 28nm or 20nm process nodes, SoC engineering teams are seeing a significant amount of variations due to manufacturability. To reflect how a design element will be printed on the wafer, foundries offer many libraries with multiple corners for different voltages, timing and temperature, among other things. “At 28nm what we are seeing is a l... » read more

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