category: Top Stories

category: Auto, Security & Edge AI

Less Room For Error
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Say goodbye to fat design margins in advanced SoCs. The commonly used method of adding extra performance or area into semiconductors to overcome variability in manufacturing processes or timing closure issues has begun to create problems of its own. While there was plenty of slack available at 90nm, adding margins at 45nm and 32nm disrupts performance or eats into an increasing... » read more

Home Sweet (Power-Hogging) Home?
By Brian Fuller - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Brian Fuller Numbers, history and technology are on a collision course inside your home. Consider the numbers: The big picture points to an even bigger opportunity for smart system design that can reduce power in and out of the chip. Since 1982, growth in peak demand for electricity has exceeded transmission growth by almost 25% every year. Yet spending on research and development �... » read more

How Many Power Islands Is Too Many?
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Power domains, also known as power islands, have become to design engineers what multiple cores are to processor architects. They can serve a purpose, namely reducing static current leakage and saving battery life. But they also can add so much complexity that they can make it almost impossible to get a new chip out the door. Just as there has been talk of hundreds of cores, th... » read more

Making Analog Easier
By Various Writers - 28 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Clive "Max" Maxfield I'm a digital design engineer by trade. All of those wibbly-wobbly effects that are characteristic of the analog domain make me nervous, and if something makes me nervous I tend to look the other way and hope it will go away. But analog isn’t going anywhere. On the contrary, the increasing amounts of analog/mixed-signal (AMS) functionality that feature in today's Sy... » read more

Intelligent Verification Offers Hope For “Smartening” Up Verification
By Cheryl Ajluni - 28 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni As with death and taxes, when it comes to design some things are just inevitable. For one, as design geometries shrink, design complexity will continue to increase. For another, verification is the single most time-consuming and intensive part of the entire design cycle. While new tools and methodologies have enabled designers to work through many of the existing complexity i... » read more

Soft Errors Create Tough Problems
By Ed Sperling - 28 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Single event upsets used to be as rare as some elements on the Periodic Table, with the damage they could cause relegated more to theory than reality. Not anymore. At 90nm, what was theory became reality. And at 45nm, the events are becoming far more common, often affecting multiple bits in increasingly dense arrays of memory and now, increasingly, in the logic. Known alter... » read more

Moore’s Law Splinters
By Ed Sperling - 28 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Moore’s Law continues progressing at a rate of one node every two years or so, but the number of companies that are adhering to that schedule is becoming much harder to pinpoint. Even the nodes themselves are becoming fuzzy. While Intel is looking at 32nm as the next node after 45nm, TSMC is looking at 28nm as the next node after 40nm. And there are likely to be extensions wi... » read more

Life Without Batteries Or Wires
By Ed Sperling - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling In portable devices, low-power design has always been about stretching out the amount of time between battery charges or replacement. But the focus of current research throws that approach to the wind. The new goal is to get rid of batteries altogether and generate power using a variety of different mechanisms ranging from differences in temperature, the motion of waves, static... » read more

Writing Software For Low-Power Systems
By Ed Sperling - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Almost any discussion of software in low power systems these days involves some sort of multicore approach. That is particularly true at 90nm and below. At 65nm, unless there is a very distinct purpose for a low-power single-core device, it probably is utilizing at least two cores, and at 45nm the numbers can continue to rise, depending upon how many functions the chip is being... » read more

Making Batteries Better
By Brian Fuller - 15 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Brian Fuller The world has changed dramatically in the 209 years since Alessandro Volta hunched over his table by candlelight and figured out how to capture energy in his voltaic pile, the first electric battery. What has changed little, however, is the battery itself. Since Volta’s conception, the battery has remained a cell with negative and positive electrodes, an electrolyte, and... » read more

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