category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Managing Complexity With Advanced Packaging
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Engineering teams across the globe continue to pound the process geometry treadmill to stay on the curve of Dr. Moore to achieve better speed or lower power or smaller die—and it all adds up to increased complexity in the design and packaging. However, with advanced forms of die stacking such as package-on-package, silicon-in-package, 2.5D silicon interposer techno... » read more

Coherency Becomes A Stack Of Issues
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling As complexity increases and the industry increasingly shifts away from ASICs to SoCs, the concept of coherency is beginning to look more like a stack of issues than a discrete piece of the design. There are at least five levels of coherency that need to be considered already, with more likely to surface as stacked die become mainstream over the next few years. Perhaps even mo... » read more

The Software Side Of Derivatives
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the options and perils associated with derivative designs well articulated today, the elephant remaining in the room is, of course, software. The software aspect of derivatives is bit muddier with some claiming the software can be maintained without modification, while others assert this is simply not possible. One indisputable fact is that software develop... » read more

SoCs Go Mainstream
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The monolithic ASIC, which has been the bread-and-butter of chipmakers for decades, is giving way to systems on a chip among mainstream chipmakers and at mainstream process nodes. This shift has been overhyped, overpromised and slow to materialize. While SoCs have been common for years in mobile electronics and for high-performance platforms such as gaming consoles, they have... » read more

Why PCs And Servers Aren’t Going Away
By Ed Sperling - 22 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee With the rise of mobile appliances, smart phones and tablets, there has been a lot of discussion about the place for PCs, servers, embedded processors and networks. A number of companies have claimed they will rule the world of computing and there will no room for others. Reality seems to be somewhat different, however. The mobile end point devices—smart phones, table... » read more

The Trouble With Power Models
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Talk with any large systems vendor about power modeling and, with very few exceptions, they’re still using a mix of spreadsheets and lower-level models—no matter how far along they are in ESL adoption and in modeling other parts of an IC. Power has crept up on even the biggest companies, which have never really figured out how to implement it into their design flows. For ... » read more

Flexibility Vs. Portability In Emulation
By Ann Mutschler - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

Complete and exhaustive verification of low-power designs requires a substantial effort and part of this includes running real applications on the hardware. Simulators fall short as designers realize that the so-called testbenches they create are artificial and don’t necessarily represent typical applications. As such, this is the sweet spot for emulators, also known as hardware accelerators,... » read more

Trading Off Power For Performance
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Integration of CODECS and graphics cores with new processor engines is proving to be a trouble spot for power optimization. Because these blocks are driven by performance and are high-duty-cycle components, the main focus has been to push the limit for process performance. These blocks still use most of the tricks identified by both UPF and CPF, including multi-phase ... » read more

Avoiding Chip Melt
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 1

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Assertions. Just the term conjures images of writing boring lines of code to feed into a simulator. But for engineering teams working at the 40nm node, the pain of making sure their verification is complete and accurate is real—and so is the potential for literally melting silicon if something goes wrong. With this in mind, ‘boring’ goes out the window and gets ... » read more

Experts vs. Expertise
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The trend in IC design—particularly for large, complex SoCs—is specialization among engineers. There are specialists for layout, for verification, for DFM, for test, and for software, among other things. And there are experts who have a smattering of many of the pieces and can oversee the integration and testing. Power is different. Because power affects every part of a d... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →

  • Sponsors

About

Navigation

Connect With Us

Copyright ©2013-2026 SMG   |  Terms of Service  |  Privacy Policy