category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

The Trouble With On-Chip Interfaces
By Ed Sperling - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The trouble with standards is that many of them arise out of need rather than through careful planning, and often unilaterally. The typical scenario in chip design is that a company has an issue to solve, so it comes up with a solution. When it gets what it believes is critical mass behind the standard, the company that developed the solution opens it up to the rest of the ind... » read more

The ESL Conundrum
By Ann Mutschler - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

As Moore’s Law continues its relentless march, the “electronic system level” (ESL), which is the next higher level of abstraction above the register transfer level (RTL), continues to be adopted as an answer to the ever-increasing complexity of designing semiconductors. Although ESL emerged about five years ago, the term itself still can confound the very community that seeks to embrac... » read more

Moving Up The Food Chain
By Ed Sperling - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling It used to be considered axiomatic that chip companies would be rewarded for spectacular technology, reflected in the market value of their components and in their stock price. But with stock prices routinely getting hammered even before the downturn, many companies have begun to re-think their mission. National Semiconductor, for one, is looking at creating modules rather than... » read more

Case Study: A Better Way To Predict Weather
By Ed Sperling - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Most of our weather predictions are developed from about 150 stationary government radar systems, which interlock and occasionally overlap to create a cohesive picture. The picture isn’t perfect—in fact, it’s probably the equivalent of looking at a large, grainy satellite photo—which creates plenty of wrong forecasts. But the system can track large storms across state bo... » read more

Exclusive Research: Where Are The Midsize Companies?
By Ed Sperling - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling In the chip world it’s beginning to look like the erosion of the middle class, or at least the middle tier. The bulk of companies working in the semiconductor industry—from design to development—have annual revenues of either less than $10 million (26.2%) or more than $500 million (25.4%). The number between $10 million and $100 million is only 12.8%, while the number be... » read more

Outsourcing Creeps Down Into Systems
By Ed Sperling - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

Offshoring started out as a less-expensive way of developing enterprise applications, but outsourced software development is beginning to move much deeper into the system-level design world. So far, development has evolved from just productivity applications to embedded software. Even large-scale system design is being outsourced. The next step is to outsource pieces of system-level designs, s... » read more

Can SaaS Really Make Chip Design Easier?
By Cheryl Ajluni - 17 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni Software as a Service (SaaS) is not a technology. It is a software deployment business model where an application is hosted as a service that is provided to customers across the Internet. Thanks to success stories from companies like Google, Salesforce.com, WebEx, and TurboTax, among others, this business model has become quite popular and is now even being looked at by some E... » read more

SOI Goes Mainstream
By Ed Sperling - 20 Nov, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The crossover for system on insulator (SOI) versus bulk CMOS was supposed to happen at the 22nm, but that was before software developers ran into problems programming multicore chips. For years, SOI was considered the high-performance cousin of CMOS—more expensive, more difficult to manufacture and unnecessary for most applications. It is the heart of the Cell processor, ... » read more

Better Ways to Connect IP
By Ed Sperling - 20 Nov, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Re-usable intellectual property may sound great on paper, but actually getting pieces to be as interchangeable as Lego parts and automatically configuring them to work in a system on a chip requires more than technology. It requires a leap of faith on the part of chip engineers, and that doesn’t happen overnight. The first step toward providing the tools was creation of the ... » read more

Special Report: Semiconductor Road Map Survey
By Ed Sperling - 06 Nov, 2008 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The upcoming semiconductor industry road map, which sets up the industry’s strategy and identifies trends for the next 15 years, is filled with three very interesting shifts and gaps. The road map, which will be formally unveiled next month, consists of findings gleaned from all the top chip companies. Juan-Antonio Carballo, a partner at IBM Venture Capital Group who spea... » read more

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