Super Wi-Fi For The IoE


From time to time the term “white space” may have popped up in wireless spectrum discussions. Generally, white space describes parts of the licensed radio spectrum that are unassigned, unused, only used part time by the licensees, or not used by them in certain geographic locations. Virtually every country in the world has some of this. Most of this exists in the television spectrum, and is... » read more

How To Model Cars


The most technologically advanced and comprehensive consumer product in the world today is not the smartphone. It's the automobile. This is easier to see once the hood is up and you can take a peek around. Today’s cars contain sophisticated motion systems, crash safety systems, climate control systems, driver assistance, and infotainment, to name a few. In semiconductor design, one of the ... » read more

Anything As A Service


Everything as a service promises to simplify our lives, from cutting edge business to consumer applications. It is too early to tell, but the concept of everything moving to the cloud poses some interesting issues, from bandwidth to security. Who would have guessed that in 2015, launching a business would require virtually no physical assets? You simply turn on your computer and everything y... » read more

Using DNA Differently


As the Internet of Everything creeps closer and closer, technologies from wireless to biometrics are undergoing metamorphosis. On the biometrics front, there is a vast array of applications, from fingerprints to facial recognition—even finger vein recognition. But the one that is garnering a lot of attention these days is DNA sequencing, and a subset called rapid DNA sequencing. Both are b... » read more

Consolidation’s Aftermath


The recent spate of industry consolidation continues to have repercussions across the semiconductor industry. Some of those effects will subside once the deals are either approved or nixed by regulatory agencies. Others will raise questions for months or years to come. Consolidation is not a new trend in the semiconductor industry, but the pace and size of the acquisitions in the past year a... » read more

The Challenge Of Fitting In


Connections between players in the semiconductor industry are becoming critical for survival. Whether the focus is a connected car, home automation, health care or the energy grid, each company in each of those markets relies on others to build useful products. There are several forces at work here. One is an emphasis on connecting everything, regardless of whether it is inside a single vert... » read more

Quantum Entanglement Test


One of the more bizarre implications of quantum theory is the so-called “spooky action at a distance” effect. If two quantum particles are entangled, measuring the state of one simultaneously defines the state of the other, regardless of the distance between them. This behavior appears to defy the rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light: information regarding the stat... » read more

Memory Choices Grow


Memory is becoming one of the starting points for SoC architectures, evolving from a basic checklist item that was almost always in the shadow of improving processor performance or lowering the overall power budget. In conjunction with that shift, chipmakers must now grapple with many more front-end decisions about placement, memory type and access prioritization. There are plenty of rules ... » read more

Handoff Points Getting Blurry


Whether driven by [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] or just sheer complexity, the way information is passed through the design and test flow is changing. For the past couple of process generations, there has been a concerted push by tool vendors and their customers to run more steps earlier in a flow, sometimes concurrently. While this so-called "shift left" helps to speed up software de... » read more

Hardware Models For Software


Shift left, while a relatively new term, has become important in all parts of the SoC design flow, but its impacts are wide ranging and many still ill defined. It basically means that tasks have to be started earlier than in the past because more accuracy is required from tasks that are further down in the flow in order to make better predictions. It also implies that more steps are performed c... » read more

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