Blog Review: March 25


Rambus' Steven Woo checks out common memory systems that are used in the highest performance AI applications and points to the differences between on-chip memory, HBM, and GDDR. Mentor's Colin Walls considers whether software for embedded systems should be delivered as a binary library or source code and warns of some key potential issues when requesting source code. A Synopsys writer poi... » read more

Memory Issues For AI Edge Chips


Several companies are developing or ramping up AI chips for systems on the network edge, but vendors face a variety of challenges around process nodes and memory choices that can vary greatly from one application to the next. The network edge involves a class of products ranging from cars and drones to security cameras, smart speakers and even enterprise servers. All of these applications in... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Silicon Labs will acquire Redpine Signals' Wi-Fi and Bluetooth business, development center in Hyderabad, India, and extensive patent portfolio for $308 million in cash. Silicon Labs says the acquisition will expand the company's IoT wireless technology, including smart phone and industrial IoT, and accelerate its roadmap for Wi-Fi 6. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2020.... » read more

Blog Review: March 18


Arm's Divya Prasad investigates whether power rails that are buried below the BEOL metal stack and back-side power delivery can help alleviate some of the major physical design challenges facing 3nm nodes and beyond. Rambus' Steven Woo takes a look at a Roofline model for analyzing machine learning applications that illustrates how AI applications perform on Google’s tensor processing unit... » read more

Designing Resilient Electronics


Electronic systems in automobiles, airplanes and other industrial applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, required to perform an expanding list of functions while also becoming smaller and lighter. As a result, pressure is growing to design extremely high-performance chips with lower energy consumption and less sensitivity to harsh environmental conditions. If this ... » read more

HBM Issues In AI Systems


All systems face limitations, and as one limitation is removed, another is revealed that had remained hidden. It is highly likely that this game of Whac-A-Mole will play out in AI systems that employ high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Most systems are limited by memory bandwidth. Compute systems in general have maintained an increase in memory interface performance that barely matches the gains in... » read more

Power Management Becomes Top Issue Everywhere


Power management is becoming a bigger challenge across a wide variety of applications, from consumer products such as televisions and set-top-boxes to large data centers, where the cost of cooling server racks to offset the impact of thermal dissipation can be enormous. Several years ago, low-power design was largely relegated to mobile devices that were dependent on a battery. Since then, i... » read more

5G Will Enable Cloud Gaming


5G stands to unlock opportunities throughout the Internet of things (IoT), from logistics to heavy industry, robotics to autonomous vehicles. Existing applications of cellular connectivity will find themselves enhanced significantly, while the lifting of traditional barriers to entry—speed, latency, network availability—will open up new applications and revenue streams that simply were... » read more

Power Challenges In ML Processors


The design of artificial intelligence (AI) chips or machine learning (ML) systems requires that designers and architects use every trick in the book and then learn some new ones if they are to be successful. Call it style, call it architecture, there are some designs that are just better than others. When it comes to power, there are plenty of ways that small changes can make large differences.... » read more

A Sneak Peek Into SVE And VLA Programming


Download this white paper to get an overview of SVE, get information on the new registers and the new instructions, and learn about the Vector Length Agnostic (VLA) programming technique, including some examples. The Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) is an extension of the ARMv8-A A64 instruction set, recently announced by ARM. Following the announcement at Hot Chips 28, a few articles describ... » read more

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