category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Mechanical Meets Electrical
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling For the first part of the 20th century mechanical engineering dominated almost everything in technology. For the second half, once the transistor and the integrated circuit became well entrenched, those two disciplines largely divided up the tech market. More recently, however, they are being forced to collaborate in teams that historically had nothing in common. While the co... » read more

Margin Of Error
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Adding extra circuits and silicon area to a chip has always been frowned upon by chipmakers. Extra silicon means extra money, and for most chips the least expensive is always the better choice. But at advanced process nodes, margin also can slow performance, increase power consumption, and make it harder to achieve timing closure. The obvious solution is to reduce margin thro... » read more

Step Away From the Spreadsheet
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Engineers today spend more than a quarter of their time trying to meet power specifications. A survey of more than 700 engineers by Calypto illustrates just how important and time-consuming power management is today for engineering teams. As consumer devices grow ever more complex, the need to deal with, analyze and optimize power at not just the RTL but at the sys... » read more

Processor Subject To Change
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With power complexity driving sophisticated management techniques, SoC design engineering teams are turning to a new class of customizable processor architectures from ARM, CEVA, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Tensilica and others to take advantage of the best in power saving techniques. While these new architectures are novel approaches, the concepts are not especially new,... » read more

When Worlds Collide: Saving Power In Communications Applications
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler The interplay of hardware and software is a given in every device that contains a semiconductor chip, but is typically felt more acutely in communications applications given the extremely close dependencies for everything power-related. Managing power in these situations just gets more challenging as consumers demand more and better applications on their tablets, smar... » read more

What Happens When The Plug Is Pulled
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee The Consumer Electronics Show featured a large variety of new devices and peripherals for the mobile and portable space. In addition to the tablet, which is the fastest growing data-consumption platform, and the laptop, which is the fastest-growing data creation and modification platform, there are a large number of peripheral devices that are being released. These devi... » read more

The Next Big Challenge
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Software is the next big target in the quest to make electronics more energy efficient, but it’s proving a far bigger challenge than most systems architects originally believed it would be. There are several very large big problems to deal with in software. Writing efficient code for small processors isn’t one of them. In fact, the proliferation of small processors across... » read more

Status Report: Power-Aware Design Flow
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler While the term “design flow” can be a moving target, there are some specific requirements for a low-power/power-aware tool flow. Looking at this from a high level, where is the industry today, and where is it headed? There are really two sides to power, which are almost like two sides of the same coin: power consumption and power integrity. And both of those ar... » read more

Rethinking Good Enough
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Power has been elevated from an afterthought to one of the top considerations and tradeoffs in SoC design, edging out performance and area in many cases and in some cases even cost and features. Tradeoffs in design always change, depending upon what the most pressing concern is among consumers at any time. For decades, performance was always the top of anyone’s list, follow... » read more

How Long Will 28nm Last?
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler As soon as a next generation semiconductor manufacturing process node is out, bets are taken on just how long the current advanced process node will last. The 28/20nm transition is no exception. There is certainly a benefit to moving from 40nm to 28nm. The  availability of high-k/metal gate technology offers quite a few advantages in terms of power reduction... » read more

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