Blog Review: March 23


How exactly does a giant fire behave in space? NASA plans to find out, in the latest top five tech picks from Ansys' Justin Nescott. Plus, never scrape ice off your car again and a pangolin-inspired motorcycle helmet. Cadence's Paul McLellan investigates the growing impact of dark silicon as Dennard scaling breaks down and the number of cores in a chip grows. Mentor's Harry Foster present... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Aldec updated its emulation and simulation acceleration software package for high speed prototyping boards, adding a SCE-MI Pipes-based flow for streaming large amounts of data, and a 30% speed increase for all emulation modes. Plus, Aldec's mixed-language FPGA design and simulation platform now includes a complete coverage analysis package for FPGA and ASIC designers with the addition... » read more

Blog Review: March 16


A bacterium that chows down on plastic could be a boon to reducing our huge piles of plastic waste, in this week's top five tech picks from Ansys' Bill Vandermark. Plus, silicon photonics got one step closer, keeping an eye on new neurons, and getting around with magnets. Can semiconductors be open sourced? Rambus' Aharon Etengoff considers what that would take, the potential impact on the I... » read more

New Memory Approaches And Issues


New memory types and approaches are being developed and tested as DRAM and Moore's Law both run out of steam, adding greatly to the confusion of what comes next and how that will affect chip designs. What fits where in the memory hierarchy is becoming less clear as the semiconductor industry grapples with these changes. New architectures, such as [getkc id="202" kc_name="fan-outs"] and [getk... » read more

New Twist On Scalable Electronics?


Snug in their tents at Everest base camp a few years ago, Matt Du Puy and his colleagues marveled at the howling snowstorm outside, until they peeked out and saw snow drifts piling up quickly. They made a quick decision to tug on their boots and seek safer ground. As they did, clutches of other campers emerged and fell in line, bleary-eyed refugees trudging through the darkness. “We got of... » read more

Keeping NFCs Secure


Short-range communications, including near-field and semi-near-field communications such as Bluetooth, AirDrop, and Zigbee, have become as much a part of our daily lives as our mobile devices. Through some incredible engineering and standards efforts, they have achieved low-power communication over short distances with remarkable accuracy and consistency. But as even more devices begin tapping ... » read more

How Many Cores? (Part 1)


The optimal number of processor cores in chip designs is becoming less obvious, in part due to new design and architectural options that make it harder to draw clear comparisons, and in part because just throwing more cores at a problem does not guarantee better performance. This is hardly a new problem, but it does have a sizable list of new permutations and variables—right-sized heteroge... » read more

Blog Review: March 9


The world's largest floating solar farm will soon be complete – an array of 23,000 solar panels on a reservoir outside London. Also in this week's top five picks by Ansys' Justin Nescott, watching sharks from the sky is a drone's latest task, plus making music with a marble machine. Synopsys' Graham Etchells continues his series with a look at electromigration and its impacts on the FinFET... » read more

Developing Effective Design Strategies For Today’s Wearable Devices: Security


We love our wearables, but wearable devices connected to public networks supporting bi-directional data flow make our devices...and us...highly susceptible to attack. Security can no longer be thought of as an “afterthought” to embedded system design; development teams must design in security methods and adopt a security development lifecycle approach that meets the appropriate security lev... » read more

Blog Review: March 2


Ansys' Bill Vandermark test drives the potential downsides of autonomous cars in his top tech articles of the week. Plus, the world's first fully robotic lettuce farm and big improvements for old technology. Synopsys' Graham Etchells takes a look at what makes FinFET layout methodology different and how 'smart' PCells can help. Mentor's John Day introduces the Open Lab Alliance, a group o... » read more

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