A Noticeably Cooler Continental Climate


Nicolas Leterrier, chief representative of the Minalogic coordination unit, whose job is to oversee the “innovation cluster” in Grenoble, France, sat down with Low-Power Engineering to discuss the changes under way in Europe, what's driving it and where researchers in Grenoble see the future challenges. What follows are excerpts of that interview. By Ed Sperling LPE: Is the impetus fo... » read more

Meeting The Challenge Of Verification In Low-Power Designs


By Cheryl Ajluni Over the years, new techniques, technologies and design tools have been brought to market with the explicit intent of simplifying design verification. Despite these efforts verification still manages to consume a huge chunk of the time spent during design. By some accounts that number tops 70%. The problem is that verification is hard, and it certainly doesn’t get an easi... » read more

Hypervisors For Managing Power


By Ed Sperling Hypervisors are headed for a new role inside of multicore chips—managing the various power islands in addition to the cores. A patent application filed by IBM, entitled “Method and syarstem for hypervisor based power management,” shows the company’s intention to use hypervisors for everything from monitoring power consumption rates to scaling power for individual core... » read more

Power Trip Advisor


By Geoffrey James There’s never been a greater demand for power-efficient silicon. As consumer electronic devices get smaller, with increased functionality, battery power becomes a premium resource. At the same time, “Green IT” is a major corporate trend, and the best way to be environmentally sensitive (while saving on energy costs) is to buy technology that ekes the maximum computing o... » read more

Power Delivery Issues


By Ed Sperling Reducing the voltage in a system on chip is like turning down the water pressure on a home plumbing system. Pretty soon you find out that not all the faucets work properly because there isn’t enough pressure behind them. While it’s vital to drop the voltage to boost battery life in mobile devices, not to mention reduce the overall power consumption in plug-in devices, t... » read more

The FPGA Alternative


By Geoffrey James Until a few years ago, SoC designers focused almost exclusively on ASICs. While it was theoretically possible to create an SoC design for an FPGA, the programmable chips were too bulky and pricey to be useful for much more than prototyping. Today, however, designers are increasingly turning to FPGAs for their SOC targets for production systems. Why the sudden upsurge in So... » read more

Outsourcing’s New Face


By Ed Sperling As the semiconductor industry digs out from one of the worst downturns in decades, the business of semiconductor design and engineering is changing. While the architecture and features are still being developed by chip companies, the actual work of developing the chip increasingly is being done by third parties. Outsourcing is hardly new concept in business. In the early pa... » read more

The Abstraction of Test


By Ann Steffora Mutschler By now, semiconductor design abstraction is old hat to many engineers, but mention the term “semiconductor test abstraction” and expect a blank stare in return. Design complexity, enormous design size, and short market windows have put tremendous pressure on test to occur earlier rather than later. Even at the RTL level, where hardware test typically has not ... » read more

Design By Consensus


By Cheryl Ajluni On Monday, October 12, the National Association of Business Economists (NABE) announced the results of a survey of professional forecasters regarding the economy. Their consensus was clear: the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression has ended. While many Americans still think the country’s economy is in poor shape, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll taken between O... » read more

Making Connections


By Ed Sperling The world is still full of engineers who can build fast interconnects to things like PCI Express or USB 2.0 who can create complex schematics for determining the connections between a processor core, memory, logic and various IP blocks on a piece of silicon. But over the next several years, many of those engineers will have to figure out new ways to make a living. The numbe... » read more

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