tag: Synopsys

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

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

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

The Growing Software Challenge: From Stacks To SMP
By Ann Mutschler - 26 Aug, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Building a system now includes software, but defining the software stack is a mounting challenge for engineers. What used to be almost exclusively drivers now includes RTOSes and OSes, executable files, middleware, firmware, IP, embedded software and applications. With millions of different embedded products, all with different sets of software, it comes down to pr... » read more

Defining Power Intent
By Ed Sperling - 12 Aug, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Designing power-sensitive SoCs has never been more challenging given the tremendous demand for power efficiency in applications ranging from smart phones to servers inside data centers. That makes describing the power control architecture of a chip through power intent essential. Specifically, explained Will Ruby, senior director of product engineering and applicat... » read more

Rethinking Models
By Ed Sperling - 12 Aug, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The move to future process nodes will require more than just new materials, better layouts and higher levels of abstraction. It also will require a fundamental re-thinking of how high-level architectural models are created and what’s included in them. While the Transaction-Level Modeling (TLM) 2.0 standard has provided significant improvements for everything from layout to ... » read more

ESL Requires New Approaches To Design And Verification
By Ann Mutschler - 22 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler As more data gets front loaded into SoC architectures today, understanding verification challenges as well as communication between the front and back end has never been more critical. “All of this is getting more complicated,” said John Ford, director of marketing at ARM. “There was a time when an ARM processor core was all that was on a chip. Now there’s ... » read more

‘Good’ Vs. ‘Good Enough’
By Ed Sperling - 22 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The decision for when a chip is ready for tapeout is changing—both in time and sometimes in terms of who’s actually making that decision—as the amount of software being developed by hardware companies continues to grow. At the root of this shift are two very different concepts about what constitutes a market-ready product. For SoC engineers, fixing bugs after a chip has... » read more

Getting Low-Power IP Integration Right
By Ed Sperling - 08 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler When it comes to integrating multivendor IP, power concerns dominate the challenges that engineers face. To get it right however, there are definitely questions that should be asked when considering which IP to use, along with techniques to manage power complexity. When choosing IP, the following points should be considered: How mature is the IP being sold? Has... » read more

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