category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Anatomy Of A (Better) Gaming Platform
By Ed Sperling - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee Microsoft’s third-generation Xbox360 engine uses a 45nm silicon on insulator (SOI) process—and a new architecture. The original design was on 90nm and then migrated to 65nm. In both of these cases the fundamental architecture of the system remained the same—a CPU (central processing unit) chip, a GPU (graphics processing unit) chip, and memory management chip for ... » read more

Software Drives Design Requirements
By Ed Sperling - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler As product design evolves to contain more and more software, that software—including the applications that run on the device—is now starting to drive design and process requirements. This change is causing ripples throughout the semiconductor industry, driving evolutionary thinking about where to go next. OEMs have taken notice of a new dynamic and want to capt... » read more

From Multicore To Many-Core
By Ed Sperling - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Future SoCs will move from multiple cores—typically two to four in a high-power processor—to dozens of cores. But answers are only beginning to emerge as to where and how those cores will be deployed and how they will be accessed. Just as Moore’s Law forced a move to multicore architectures inside a single processor because of leakage at higher frequencies, it will begi... » read more

Where’s The Multicore Software?
By Ed Sperling - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By David Lammers Multicore processors are being readied for embedded applications but software developers will need to get prepared if they expect to wring the maximum benefits from them. Rob Oshana, director of software R&D at Freescale Semiconductor’s networking and multimedia group, said software developers increasingly are asking if their code will easily port to multicore CPUs. �... » read more

Moving To Open-Source Software
By Ann Mutschler - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the typical cost of software accounting for 40% to 60% of an SoC, semiconductor OEMs are under more pressure than ever to meet margins. As a result, they are drawing on their ecosystem partners to provide a more complete foundation including hardware, software, FPGA prototypes, verification IP and virtual models, as well as an increasing demand for open source so... » read more

The Power In Errors
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By David Lammers Since 1956, some of the top minds in information processing, including Claude Shannon and John von Neumann, have been pondering the problem of how to build reliable systems out of unreliable components. The communications industry embraced the challenge, and deployed error correction techniques to ensure that today’s most sensitive information is transmitted reliably over no... » read more

A New Reference For Low-Power Processors
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chattejee Just how much power can you squeeze out of a processor without destroying performance? Ask IBM. The company introduced a new methodology for power and energy management on its multicore processor chips. The new PowerPC chip, the Power 7, has eight main processor cores each with its own L2 and L3 cache and two central memory controllers. The architecture for the design is... » read more

What’s In The Package?
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler The growing market for smart mobile devices and high-performance processors requiring more than 2GHz of processing power is driving IP providers to do even more work to prepare their IP offerings for customers. This theme was reflected at last week’s GlobalFoundries Global Technology Conference when the company’s senior VP of technology and R&D Gregg Bartle... » read more

Estimating Power From Mobile Device Apps
By Ann Mutschler - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler How do software application developers – even the ones sitting at home on their living room sofas with laptops – measure the power consumption of their application on the target device? This is a big problem today (something that is painfully obvious to owners of iPhones or Blackberries), and it will only get bigger. Software engineers may think it is not their... » read more

Changes In The Ecosystem
By Ed Sperling - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling For the better part of two decades, semiconductor companies have been talking about ecosystems mostly for marketing and economic reasons. They’re now talking thinking about ecosystems for complex technology reasons that involve integrated models for power, transactions and manufacturability. In the late 1990s, IBM began assembling its own loose ecosystem as a way of shieldi... » read more

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