Power Panel: IP And Other Key Issues For Future Development


By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering chaired a DesignCon panel of low-power experts with Bhanu Kapoor, president of Mimasic; Kesava Talupuru, DV engineer at MIPS; Prapanna Tiwari, CAE manager at Synopsys, and Rob Aitken, an ARM Fellow. What follows are excerpts of their presentations and the panel discussion that followed. Prapanna Tiwari: UPF and CPF are text files that capture the power i... » read more

Gene’s Law Meets EDA


By Pallab Chatterjee What will be the next major improvement that will cut power levels by an order of magnitude? That question was the basis of a roundtable discussion at the recent ISSC conference. Current technology provides incremental improvements each year, but the next generation of electronic systems will require dramatic changes and innovation. This premise is based on Gene’s Law... » read more

The Shocking Side Of 3D


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The pesky static charge that builds up on your clothing when you forget the dryer sheet is more than just a nuisance when it comes to manufacturing ICs. Add 3D structures and process scaling to the mix and the challenge of adequately protecting those devices grows significantly. While this problem used to be largely an afterthought, the charged-device model type of... » read more

The True Test Of IP Reuse


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Fewer and fewer systems and semiconductor companies are designing brand new processors from scratch. Instead, they leverage as much IP as possible in their designs, investing selectivity in areas where they can add significant value. The challenges are varied from low-power issues to process technology migrations. Generally, IP consumers are doing two levels of IP-... » read more

Memory, Bandwidth And SoC Performance


By Ann Steffora Mutschler High-end SoC architectures today can contain dozens of processing engines—multiple cores from MIPS and ARM, DSPs from Tensilica and CEVA, and even graphics processors. But with so many cores there also is a need for enormous amounts of memory, and that has been creating some unexpected design problems, In many cases so much memory is required for an SoC that some... » read more

The Growing Importance Of Subsystems


By Ed Sperling A growing reliance on third-party IP is beginning to expand well beyond just IP blocks and into full subsystems, opening significant growth opportunities for companies competing in this market as well as enormous business and technical challenges. The IP market is ripe for this kind of convergence. Complexity at advanced process nodes coupled with time-to-market demands has e... » read more

The Enterprise Effect


By Pallab Chatterjee In the enterprise it’s all about speed and power—as in more speed and less power—and those changes are forcing shifts in the chip architectures as well as the processes used to develop those chips. At the Linley Data Center Conference the next generation of network control chips were discussed. The keys for the new networks are 10G data lanes to be used with 10G/4... » read more

Stuck In The Corners


It’s common for semiconductor design teams to spend 60% to 70% of product development time on verification, which is why verification has bubbled to the top of the management chain as a concern. Executives worry about the predictability of their product development cycle because so much of it is dependent on successful execution of verification, the ability to achieve coverage closure and the... » read more

EDA Forecast: More Clouds


By Ed Sperling Design engineers and EDA vendors used to scoff at the idea of cloud-based tools, but no one is scoffing anymore. A decade after the idea of renting tools online fell flat, largely due to security concerns by chipmakers, all three of the major EDA players and some smaller rivals are taking cloud-based solutions very seriously again. There are several reasons for this change... » read more

Power Panel: IP And Other Key Issues For Future Development


Low-Power Engineering chaired a DesignCon panel of low-power experts with Bhanu Kapoor, president of Mimasic; Kesava Talupuru, DV engineer at MIPS; Prapanna Tiwari, CAE manager at Synopsys, and Rob Aitken, an ARM Fellow. What follows are excerpts of their presentations and the panel discussion that followed. Bhanu Kapoor: There are two components of power—dynamic and leakage. Dynamic is wh... » read more

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