Combining Power And Synthesis


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Each passing design node shrinks electronic designs ever smaller and more complex, which has made power management a critical design priority – even in the synthesis step in the design flow. Synthesis has always been an integral part of the design process, particularly at the RTL level. But as chip design has become more complicated, the need to raise the pro... » read more

Slow Start To Software-As-A-Service


By Pallab Chatterjee Can software as a service (SaaS) really work in the SoC design tools world? While many of the large EDA vendors continue to experiment with it, the future of this model isn’t especially promising. This is contrary to the overall trend among big software makers, which even in the large enterprise applications space are finding success with SaaS and the related cl... » read more

Stacked Dies Gain Attention, But So Far Little Traction


By Ed Sperling For the better part of two decades there has been a steady stream of predictions about the abrupt end of Moore’s Law, but it now appears the formula for doubling the number of transistors on a die every couple years will simply dissipate rather than fall off a cliff. While companies such as Intel and IBM continue to develop road maps that extend their road maps all the wa... » read more

Making DFM Work Better


By Ann Steffora Mutschler At 65nm, design for manufacturing optimization and analysis has mostly been an afterthought. At 40nm and beyond, DFM has been pushed well up into the design phase. There are good reasons for this shift. What emerged at the 65nm node were signoff tools that understand manufacturing used in semiconductor design, said Manoj Chako, a product director for digital si... » read more

The Ins And Outs Of Power Conversion


By Cheryl Ajluni Power conversion is a general term that refers to a system or device producing an output that is different than its input. It can assume many forms—everything from an inverter to an isolated power supply, uninterruptable power supply (UPS), or AC/DC converter. Power conversion, like low-power design, is fairly commonplace these days. Nevertheless, recent advances in digital ... » read more

Reducing Power In Plasma Display Panels


By the EEFocus staff In early 2009 there was a lot of coverage in the media at home and abroad about plasma display panel (PDP) TV sets being banned in the EU. Paul Gray, Director of European TV Research, denied the claim but did mention that they were planning to set minimum energy efficiency standards for flat-panel TVs and set maximum energy consumption limits according to screen sizes. He ... » read more

Greener Data Centers


By Ed Sperling For decades the race inside the data center was all about performance. If you upgraded from an IBM Series/370 mainframe to a Series/380 your applications ran faster. And if you upgraded your PC server from a Pentium II to a Pentium 4 you got significantly better performance. The race now is to reduce the number of servers altogether, to lower the cooling costs per server ra... » read more

Differentiating Embedded Processors


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The embedded processor world addresses a vast range of applications – from the datacenter to the biomedical device – all of which have critical power needs that vary with the use. Power concerns continue to dominate the embedded system whether it is avoid a noisy fan in a TV set-top box, allow video on a mobile phone or minimize pricey cooling costs in the datac... » read more

Experts At The Table: Rising Complexity Meets Verification


Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss rising complexity and its effects on verification with Barry Pangrle, solutions architect for low power design and verification at Mentor Graphics; Tom Borgstrom, director of solutions marketing at Synopsys; Lauro Rizzatti, vice president of worldwide marketing at EVE, and Prakash Narain, president and CEO Real Intent. What follows are excerpts of that ... » read more

With ESL, You Are Your Ecosystem


Where are the weak links in the ESL ecosystem?   That question isn’t idle speculation. With complexity in many SoC designs reaching well beyond the level of human comprehension—even beyond the capabilities of the most brilliant engineers or architects—chip developers on all levels need to know what can go wrong from both a technology and a business standpoint.   No company can dev... » read more

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