category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Making Quality A Top Priority in Next-Generation Designs
By Cheryl Ajluni - 25 Jun, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni With system design such a complicated task these days, it is increasingly likely that designers will inadvertently overlook some details of the design process, or worse yet, simply not have the time to address them adequately. Time is readily spent focusing on things like performance, area, timing, and power, but what about something a bit more esoteric in nature—namely, qu... » read more

Custom IC Design: They Call This Progress?
By Ed Sperling - 25 Jun, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling For decades, analog and digital engineers have lived in completely separate worlds. The lines are blurring between those worlds, though, in complex SoCs. So far, the transition has been difficult, and most engineers predict it will get worse at future process nodes. The basic problem is that each world has functioned independently of the other from the start. They use different... » read more

Hiring Begins Again—Slowly
By Ann Mutschler - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ann Mutschler & Ed Sperling After one of the longest downturns in many decades, hiring has started again in parts of the semiconductor industry. No one would call it a hiring boom, and some companies that have been postponing layoffs are still making cuts, but there is definitely is a change under way. This is evident on some of the job boards, which have postings for engineers with pa... » read more

Why Semiconductor Packaging Matters
By Ann Mutschler - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler After decades of being considered almost an afterthought, semiconductor packaging is emerging as an integral part of the Moore’s Law road map. Power, heat, manufacturing and impurities like soft errors have become so pronounced at 45nm and 32nm that they are actually beginning affect the package. And while these problems are not new, continual shrinking has made th... » read more

Pain Points At 22nm And Beyond
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The roadmap for 22nm has a giant pothole in the middle of it. That hole is supposed to be filled by extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV. Instead it is being patched up using immersion lithography, which is about to cause some monumental headaches for design teams. The difference is comparable to a surgeon using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. The cut isn’t nearly as ... » read more

Formal Verification 101
By Various Writers - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Clive "Max" Maxfield The first time I came into contact with the concepts of a digital hardware description language (HDL) and digital logic simulation, I inherently understood how it all "worked." The idea that the statements in the modeling language acted in a concurrent manner just seemed to make sense. By comparison, trying to wrap my brain around formal verification has always mad... » read more

Where SaaS Works Best
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Some of the largest corporations in the world use software-as-a-service, or SaaS to run their enterprise applications, trusting day-to-day operations to companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft and even Google. But good luck finding any leading-edge chip vendors utilizing the SaaS model for their designs. While Cadence has been successful with some of its low-end to... » read more

Making Sense Out Of Convergence
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Technology convergence and market consolidation have always gone hand in hand, although not necessarily in ways everyone expects. The confluence of video and audio was first exhibited by AT&T at the 1964 World’s Fair. The rather crude videophone demonstration promised a future where people could actually see the person they were talking with. Fast forward 45 years and... » read more

Lines Blur Between Processor And Microcontroller
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Big changes are happening in the microcontroller market. That statement alone should give pause for most design engineers and raise their level of skepticism. In the past, microcontrollers were a steady business but not exactly an interesting one. That was before the big push toward “green” and the 65nm process node. And it was before vendors began adding logic and more fun... » read more

Making Analog Easier
By Various Writers - 28 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Clive "Max" Maxfield I'm a digital design engineer by trade. All of those wibbly-wobbly effects that are characteristic of the analog domain make me nervous, and if something makes me nervous I tend to look the other way and hope it will go away. But analog isn’t going anywhere. On the contrary, the increasing amounts of analog/mixed-signal (AMS) functionality that feature in today's Sy... » read more

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