category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Reliability Concerns Grow
By Ed Sperling - 05 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Knowing when to signoff on an IC design has always been as much art as science, matching engineering experience with managed risk. As ICs become more complex, however, even the most advanced chip companies are getting things wrong. Some of this can be fixed through software and some of it can be tweaked with programmable firmware. But some of it may have to be fixed in the ne... » read more

Power, Applications Drive New Thinking On System Planning
By Ed Sperling - 05 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Throwing out the term ‘application-driven power-aware design methodology’ may sound like gobbledygook to some, but this concept is keeping many technologists awake at night—especially considering video games that heat iPads to 100+ degrees centigrade (near melting). The problem is very real, and potentially painful in more ways than one. The iPad example, al... » read more

Getting Ready For Stacked Die
By Ed Sperling - 05 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The move toward stacking of die has always been a series of disconnected pieces and vague promises for the future, but in the past few months the scenario has changed radically—and so has the commentary. All three of the Big Three EDA vendors now have at least some of the pieces in place for 2.5D stacking and are working on a full 3D flow. Two of the biggest FPGA vendors, A... » read more

The Trouble With Power Models
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Talk with any large systems vendor about power modeling and, with very few exceptions, they’re still using a mix of spreadsheets and lower-level models—no matter how far along they are in ESL adoption and in modeling other parts of an IC. Power has crept up on even the biggest companies, which have never really figured out how to implement it into their design flows. For ... » read more

Flexibility Vs. Portability In Emulation
By Ann Mutschler - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

Complete and exhaustive verification of low-power designs requires a substantial effort and part of this includes running real applications on the hardware. Simulators fall short as designers realize that the so-called testbenches they create are artificial and don’t necessarily represent typical applications. As such, this is the sweet spot for emulators, also known as hardware accelerators,... » read more

Trading Off Power For Performance
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Integration of CODECS and graphics cores with new processor engines is proving to be a trouble spot for power optimization. Because these blocks are driven by performance and are high-duty-cycle components, the main focus has been to push the limit for process performance. These blocks still use most of the tricks identified by both UPF and CPF, including multi-phase ... » read more

Avoiding Chip Melt
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 1

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Assertions. Just the term conjures images of writing boring lines of code to feed into a simulator. But for engineering teams working at the 40nm node, the pain of making sure their verification is complete and accurate is real—and so is the potential for literally melting silicon if something goes wrong. With this in mind, ‘boring’ goes out the window and gets ... » read more

Experts vs. Expertise
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The trend in IC design—particularly for large, complex SoCs—is specialization among engineers. There are specialists for layout, for verification, for DFM, for test, and for software, among other things. And there are experts who have a smattering of many of the pieces and can oversee the integration and testing. Power is different. Because power affects every part of a d... » read more

Pathfinding For Power And Heat
By Ed Sperling - 02 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling There are many ways to measure power and heat in an IC, and each one of them adds tremendous value to a design. But there are still holes, and those holes are just beginning to get filled. Power and heat have emerged as two of the most persistent problems in advanced designs, and there is no single or simple way to tackle either of them. Nevertheless, there is at least progre... » read more

Power Forces Changes In Portable Audio Design
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Power is becoming an overriding issue in the analog world, and nowhere was this more apparent than at the recent NAMM show. The annual show, which is run by the National Association of Music Merchants, featured mostly iOS applications and higher-performance hardware plug-ins, although Android development is starting show up. The recent releases of Android support the ... » read more

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