category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Upgrading the 100-year-old grid, one standard at a time
By Brian Fuller - 10 Jun, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Brian Fuller The nation’s power grid hasn’t been upgraded in a century, but suddenly there’s a sense of urgency. In high-profile meetings from Washington to Santa Clara in the past two months, industry executives, scientists, engineers and government officials have ratcheted up the dialogue about modernizing how energy is generated, distributed and used. The movement, helped by a... » read more

Hiring Begins Again—Slowly
By Ann Mutschler - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ann Mutschler & Ed Sperling After one of the longest downturns in many decades, hiring has started again in parts of the semiconductor industry. No one would call it a hiring boom, and some companies that have been postponing layoffs are still making cuts, but there is definitely is a change under way. This is evident on some of the job boards, which have postings for engineers with pa... » read more

Why Semiconductor Packaging Matters
By Ann Mutschler - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler After decades of being considered almost an afterthought, semiconductor packaging is emerging as an integral part of the Moore’s Law road map. Power, heat, manufacturing and impurities like soft errors have become so pronounced at 45nm and 32nm that they are actually beginning affect the package. And while these problems are not new, continual shrinking has made th... » read more

Pain Points At 22nm And Beyond
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The roadmap for 22nm has a giant pothole in the middle of it. That hole is supposed to be filled by extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV. Instead it is being patched up using immersion lithography, which is about to cause some monumental headaches for design teams. The difference is comparable to a surgeon using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. The cut isn’t nearly as ... » read more

Formal Verification 101
By Various Writers - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Clive "Max" Maxfield The first time I came into contact with the concepts of a digital hardware description language (HDL) and digital logic simulation, I inherently understood how it all "worked." The idea that the statements in the modeling language acted in a concurrent manner just seemed to make sense. By comparison, trying to wrap my brain around formal verification has always mad... » read more

Where SaaS Works Best
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Some of the largest corporations in the world use software-as-a-service, or SaaS to run their enterprise applications, trusting day-to-day operations to companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft and even Google. But good luck finding any leading-edge chip vendors utilizing the SaaS model for their designs. While Cadence has been successful with some of its low-end to... » read more

Making Sense Out Of Convergence
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Technology convergence and market consolidation have always gone hand in hand, although not necessarily in ways everyone expects. The confluence of video and audio was first exhibited by AT&T at the 1964 World’s Fair. The rather crude videophone demonstration promised a future where people could actually see the person they were talking with. Fast forward 45 years and... » read more

Lines Blur Between Processor And Microcontroller
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Big changes are happening in the microcontroller market. That statement alone should give pause for most design engineers and raise their level of skepticism. In the past, microcontrollers were a steady business but not exactly an interesting one. That was before the big push toward “green” and the 65nm process node. And it was before vendors began adding logic and more fun... » read more

The Gleaning Power of Piezo
By Brian Fuller - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Brian Fuller The inventor and green-tech missionary Trevor Baylis walked 100 miles across an African desert nearly 10 years ago to prove piezoelectric technology could power a cell phone. It was an interesting story that quickly faded from memory, as the technology was deemed clever but impractical. Enter Elizabeth Redmond and Andrew Katz, who have taken Baylis’ inspiration and piezo’s... » read more

Lower Power, Bigger Problems
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low power used to be an afterthought in semiconductor design, and it almost was never a consideration in verification or manufacturability. But at each new process node, the number of power considerations goes up as the line widths go down. To begin with, there are two basic types of power. The first is dynamic, which has been a consideration ever since batteries were added int... » read more

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