Power Management Trumps Battery Technology


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The lithium-ion battery has the power to ruin someone’s day, especially when it dies and cannot be charged, not to mention occasional thermal runaways that literally cause explosions. For a technology that is about 30 years old, and approaching its limits, it is mind-boggling that the best brains on the planet haven’t come up with a technological superior alternat... » read more

Healthy Living Electronics Dominated By Power


By Pallab Chatterjee The theme for this years ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference) is “Electronics for Healthy Living.” In addition to the new microprocessors, memory and data converter technologies, the focus and keynotes are directed toward health-care products. The common theme between all the talks is that health-care is being driven by mobility, information flow, a... » read more

No More Netlist Hacking


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Prior to availability of advanced physical verification tools, it was not uncommon for engineering teams to hack netlists. It sounds very clandestine, but was done out of the need to get detailed information on particular areas of the chip suspected to be a problem. Performing electrical rules checks (ERC) to improve the correctness and reliability of IC designs b... » read more

The Missing Pieces In Power Modeling—And Who’s Going To Provide Them


By Ed Sperling The push to develop power models is growing at each node, and at 22nm it will be virtually impossible to proceed without one or more models for power. Providing these kind of models is easier said than done, however. Creating an accurate power model requires accurate data from all the other pieces on a chip that potentially can affect the power. That includes how third-party ... » read more

The Quest To Better Define Applications


By Ed Sperling For nearly five decades, just being able to get software to run on hardware and communicate with other systems was considered a feat of engineering. But with that part of the technology solved well enough, the next big challenge is to make sure that applications can run as efficiently as possible to maximize performance, minimize power consumption and limit the area required to ... » read more

Connecting System-Level Flows To Implementation Tools


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the complexity explosion occurring in SoC design today, there is a relentless force to push design decisions further up in terms of abstraction. Resolving issues at the gate level is not possible any more because there just isn’t enough time or resources. Further, the resulting design may not even be competitive because optimization at the gate level can leave ... » read more

Tailoring IP, Tools And Flows


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As SoC and system complexity rises continually and software drives much more in a system, specific vertical application areas will require tailored IP and tool flows to allow designers to meet time-to-market demands. Today, many systems are designed around a platform, which contains most of the STAR IP—processors, GPUs, memory controllers, interconnects, memory s... » read more

What’s A Cell Phone?


By Ed Sperling Just because a smart phone is sold by Verizon or AT&T mobile no longer means that it will be used primarily as a phone. That distinction may sound trivial, but it has deep implications for the components that are used inside of these devices, how they’re used, and who wins the designs. Shifts such as this can also lead to broad changes in who buys the tools to develop t... » read more

The Quest To Better Define Applications


By Ed Sperling For nearly five decades, just being able to get software to run on hardware and communicate with other systems was considered a feat of engineering. But with that part of the technology solved well enough, the next big challenge is to make sure that applications can run as efficiently as possible to maximize performance, minimize power consumption and limit the area required to ... » read more

Connecting System-Level Flows To Implementation Tools


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the complexity explosion occurring in SoC design today, there is a relentless force to push design decisions further up in terms of abstraction. Resolving issues at the gate level is not possible any more because there just isn’t enough time or resources. Further, the resulting design may not even be competitive because optimization at the gate level can leave ... » read more

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