IP Consolidation Improves Reliability


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As individual blocks of IP in an IC design grow to more than 1 million gates, making sure each block functions reliably and interfaces with the system properly is a make-or-break scenario for many companies. For one thing, getting it right is absolutely critical as the semiconductor industry reaches its maturity point with margins harder to reach. Coupled with an ind... » read more

Achieving Successful LTE Design and Test


By Cheryl Ajluni In spite of all of its hype, WiMAX is not the only standard causing a stir these days or being called a “killer app.” Another technology that has achieved this illustrious title is Long Term Evolution (LTE), the Third Generation Partnership Project’s (3GPP’s) air interface for wireless access. Granted, WiMAX does have the advantage of a head start in development, test... » read more

New Pain Points In System-Level Design


By Ed Sperling One of the strange things about downturns is they force companies to re-examine what they do and question what kind of value they bring to the market. This is particularly true in the semiconductor world, where the average selling prices for chips has been sliding for the better part of two decades. In the case of the chip industry, which is heavily cyclical, that leaves lo... » read more

One Design, Many Products


By Pallab Chatterjee The tightening worldwide economy finally has forced the consumer products arena to adopt an aggressive single-SKU mentality for their products. This means companies are now making a single standard product that can be sold into multiple applications. This marks a radical shift in the way products are being designed, a direction that makes the design and development proces... » read more

Not Everyone Feels The Pinch


By Ed Sperling In the midst of the longest and deepest downturn since the invention of the transistor, not everyone is doing badly. In fact, there are some bright spots across the electronics industry that seem to defy gravity, so to speak. In particular, design tools are doing well. When the industry is down, they’re typically down less because, as any successful executive in technolog... » read more

The Trouble With On-Chip Interfaces


By Ed Sperling The trouble with standards is that many of them arise out of need rather than through careful planning, and often unilaterally. The typical scenario in chip design is that a company has an issue to solve, so it comes up with a solution. When it gets what it believes is critical mass behind the standard, the company that developed the solution opens it up to the rest of the ind... » read more

The ESL Conundrum


As Moore’s Law continues its relentless march, the “electronic system level” (ESL), which is the next higher level of abstraction above the register transfer level (RTL), continues to be adopted as an answer to the ever-increasing complexity of designing semiconductors. Although ESL emerged about five years ago, the term itself still can confound the very community that seeks to embrac... » read more

Moving Up The Food Chain


By Ed Sperling It used to be considered axiomatic that chip companies would be rewarded for spectacular technology, reflected in the market value of their components and in their stock price. But with stock prices routinely getting hammered even before the downturn, many companies have begun to re-think their mission. National Semiconductor, for one, is looking at creating modules rather than... » read more

Case Study: A Better Way To Predict Weather


By Ed Sperling Most of our weather predictions are developed from about 150 stationary government radar systems, which interlock and occasionally overlap to create a cohesive picture. The picture isn’t perfect—in fact, it’s probably the equivalent of looking at a large, grainy satellite photo—which creates plenty of wrong forecasts. But the system can track large storms across state bo... » read more

Exclusive Research: Where Are The Midsize Companies?


By Ed Sperling In the chip world it’s beginning to look like the erosion of the middle class, or at least the middle tier. The bulk of companies working in the semiconductor industry—from design to development—have annual revenues of either less than $10 million (26.2%) or more than $500 million (25.4%). The number between $10 million and $100 million is only 12.8%, while the number be... » read more

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