category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Life Without Batteries Or Wires
By Ed Sperling - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling In portable devices, low-power design has always been about stretching out the amount of time between battery charges or replacement. But the focus of current research throws that approach to the wind. The new goal is to get rid of batteries altogether and generate power using a variety of different mechanisms ranging from differences in temperature, the motion of waves, static... » read more

Writing Software For Low-Power Systems
By Ed Sperling - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Almost any discussion of software in low power systems these days involves some sort of multicore approach. That is particularly true at 90nm and below. At 65nm, unless there is a very distinct purpose for a low-power single-core device, it probably is utilizing at least two cores, and at 45nm the numbers can continue to rise, depending upon how many functions the chip is being... » read more

Making Batteries Better
By Brian Fuller - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Brian Fuller The world has changed dramatically in the 209 years since Alessandro Volta hunched over his table by candlelight and figured out how to capture energy in his voltaic pile, the first electric battery. What has changed little, however, is the battery itself. Since Volta’s conception, the battery has remained a cell with negative and positive electrodes, an electrolyte, and... » read more

Easing System Creation With Embedded Hardware Solutions And Standards
By Cheryl Ajluni - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni System creation is today an ultra-complex task. On one hand, developers are confronted with consumer demands for ever more functionality, better performance and increased power efficiency at a lower cost. On the other hand, they face stringent time-to-market requirements and changing standards, coupled with the need to accommodate a range of requirements pertaining to differen... » read more

Exclusive Research: What’s Happening With Third-Party IP
By Ed Sperling - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

Analog and mixed signal IP began closing the gap with digital core IP in design explorations in the first two months of this year, a clear sign that multicore systems on chip have emerged as the dominant semiconductor model and that the architecture requires both types of IP. While it’s too early to tell this year what effect that will have on overall design activity—the economy is the rea... » read more

Taming The Multicore Beast
By Ed Sperling - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Multicore chips are here to stay. Now what? That question is echoing up and down the ranks of tools vendors, design engineers, software developers and even among people who measure the performance and efficiency of semiconductors. There is now a Multicore Expo and a Multicore Association that includes a who’s who of electronics. And there are lots of working groups developing... » read more

Thinking Digital To Design Analog, And Vice Versa
By Ed Sperling - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Until several years ago, analog was a world apart from digital. Analog engineers could comfortably avoid many of the issues of Moore’s Law, viewing it as a costly bad habit with an equally bad outcome. Most analog engineers gloated privately that they could still develop chips at 250nm, or at worst 130nm, while their digital counterparts were struggling to keep up with is... » read more

Exploring The Use Of Virtual Platforms At The Electronic System Level
By Cheryl Ajluni - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni System design is hard. That should not come as a surprise to anyone these days. With design geometries shrinking and device complexity on the rise, this fact is not likely to change anytime soon. One concept for easing that burden for system-level designers is the virtual platform. Granted, the concept itself is nothing new, but today it is being employed in ever more creativ... » read more

Trends in System-Level Prototyping
By Various Writers - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Clive Maxfield One problem with electronics is that certain terms can mean different things, depending on who one is talking to at the time. Even worse, some terms have a tendency to evolve over time. This means that when we are presented with a topic like "Trends in System-Level Prototyping," before leaping headfirst into the fray, it may be a good idea to first define exactly what we mean... » read more

Follow The Design Activity
By Ed Sperling - 17 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

Everyone seems to be on a low-power kick, from the ASIC/ASSP world to the growing market of low-power embedded processors and SoCs. But what do the actual numbers tell us about the future trends for such low-power designs? One way to answer that question is to look at the result of architectural tradeoff studies currently being performed by chip designers. (See chart below) A causal glance a... » read more

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