Infrastructure Needed For The “Internet Of Things”


By Pallab Chatterjee There has been a lot of buzz about the “Internet of Things” (IoT), the world being “constantly connected,” “wireless everywhere” and “ubiquitous connectivity.” These are great ideas and they’re driving the development of mobile and sensor-based devices. However, for the data to show up someplace, whether it is the cloud or a private repository, data netwo... » read more

Tri-Gate’s Fallout


By David Lammers Intel Corp. dropped a rock into the pond of transistor technology when it announced its 22nm tri-gate technology in San Francisco earlier this month. The ripples continue to move out from that event, with impacts on IDMs, foundries, and fabless semiconductor companies being closely studied. Now that Intel has come out of the closet with its tri-gate technology, “the found... » read more

The Upside Of Dark Silicon


By Ed Sperling For many years the real challenge in IC design was in shrinking the components and features on a piece of silicon without burning up the chip or destroying signal integrity. Chipmakers have become quite adept at this over the past few decades. Too good, in fact. Now they are faced with a different kind of problem—what to do with all that extra silicon. Just as the long dist... » read more

‘What If’ In 3D


By Ed Sperling ‘What if’ questions have become standard across multiple pieces of the design chain for any SoC, but the number is multiplying at each new process node. When the industry begins moving to 2.5D and 3D over the next couple years, the number of tradeoffs will likely move from overwhelming to unmanageable. That will set in motion a number of efforts in semiconductor design. ... » read more

Mobile Applications Drive New Architectures


By Pallab Chatterjee The push toward mobility in consumer devices is having an impact on the entire component flow. Mobile devices are dominated by two key factors—an overriding power constraint and very high data bandwidth. The power constraints are on the mobile device side and on the cloud-based support server side. The high data bandwidth issues are due to the limited processing powe... » read more

EDA’s Big Challenge


By Ann Steffora Mutschler It is not news to anyone that the growth rate of the EDA industry has been less than impressive, to put it politely. Traditional EDA implementation tools have hit commodity status and something’s got to change. Thankfully, there are a host of challenges coming in the form of system-level (and higher) design, not to mention what will be required for true 3D chips. ... » read more

SoC Ecosystems Become More Tightly Integrated


By Ed Sperling SoC ecosystems are changing. Quality and focus are replacing volumes of names as companies that fund them begin to narrow down which partners add the most value and which markets they need to target. Establishing a ring of allies is nothing new, of course. IBM had its circle of most trusted software partners back in the 1970s when mainframes were the dominant computing platfo... » read more

The Multiple Faces Of Virtual Prototyping


Virtual prototyping conjures either confusion or relief, so it should come as no surprise that some chip designers are still confused about the different types of prototypes on the market. “Virtual prototyping is going through a change right now,” explained Gary Smith, founder and chief analyst for Gary Smith EDA. “Today, users are using cycle-based tools to prototype sections of their... » read more

The Quest For A Better IP Integration Methodology


By Ed Sperling With the amount of IP in SoC designs now hitting an estimated 70% to 90%, companies are scrambling to figure out a way to more consistently integrate that IP and to test that it will work as expected. This is easier said than done, however, for a number of reasons: There are numerous types of IP, ranging from I/O to logic and memory. Not all IP is of equal quality. ... » read more

Fishing For Ideas In A Bigger Pond


By Ann Steffora Mutschler From networking to optical modeling to open source software platforms, EDA engineers are drawing from a variety of disciplines to develop tools for chip design, stretching the technology beyond its original intent. To this end, Synopsys acquired Optical Research Associates (ORA) last fall to add optical design and analysis to its portfolio. The acquisition allowed ... » read more

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