The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mergers & Acqusitions Mentor Graphics acquired Tanner EDA, bolstering their position in tools for analog, mixed-signal and MEMs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. NXP joins forces with Freescale. The merger carries a $16.7 billion price tag and potentially creates a new leader in the automotive and MCU markets. Standards Accellera sent UVM 1.2 off to the IEEE P1800.2 working... » read more

Incremental Design Methodologies


There are times when we become stuck in the past, or choose to believe something that is no longer true or actually never was true. As we get older, we are all guilty of that. History tends to rewrite itself, especially given that this industry is aging. One of these situations occurred recently, and comments from an industry luminary didn’t align with the thoughts and memories of other peopl... » read more

Feathers Ruffled By IEEE Patent License Changes


Standards are essential for any market to grow. Products that are completely proprietary tend to serve small niche markets whereas those based on standards can grow through collaborations, independent content creation, and many other ways. Just think about where we would be if there were no communications standards – no WiFi, no cellular standards. You would be locked into buying all of your ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mergers/Acquisitions ARM acquired Offspark, a Dutch company specializing in IoT communications security. Use of Offspark's PolarSSL embedded Transport Layer Security (TLS) solution is widespread in the IoT industry. PolarSSL will be rebranded mbed TLS and integrated into ARM's mbed OS. Tools Mentor Graphics is bringing together a suite of technologies that enable a multi-platform appro... » read more

With Responsibility Comes Power


The debate continues as to whether [getkc id="106" kc_name="power"] has risen to become a primary design consideration, or if it remains secondary to functionality and performance. What is indisputable is the rise in the importance of both power and energy conservation. As technology improves, additional aspects of the design flow are being affected. With that, the focus for power reduction is ... » read more

Accellera Adds Portable Stimulus Group


[getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] created a working group for the portable test and stimulus, which would allow engineering teams to create the test once and be able to run it throughout the flow. This is a big deal in verification because it allows horizontal reuse of a [getkc id="55" kc_name="testbench"]. Test patterns run on the processors in a design and that enables the test to ... » read more

Tools And Flows In 2015


This year more than 26 people provided predictions for 2015. Most of these came from the EDA industry, so the results may be rather biased. However, ecosystems are coming closer together in many parts of the semiconductor food chain, meaning that the EDA companies often can see what is happening in dependent industries and in the system design houses. Thus their predictions may have already res... » read more

Industry Scorecard For 2014


At the end of last year, Semiconductor Engineering asked the industry about the developments they expected to see in 2014. If you care to refresh your memory, they were categorized under markets, semiconductors and development tools. Now it is time to look back and see how accurate those predictions were and where they fell short. Part one addressed the market and semiconductor areas and in thi... » read more

The Internet Of Cores


Ever since the birth of the third-party [getkc id="43" comment="IP"] market, there has been a desire for plug-and-play compatibility between cores. Part of the value proposition of reuse is that a block has been used before, and has been verified and validated by having been implemented in silicon. By re-using the core, many of these tasks no longer land on the [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"] dev... » read more

Energy Boost For Power Standards


If the amount of standards work and industry effort that is being expended on a given topic is any indicator of the growing importance of a design concern, then power has most certainly become the hottest topic in the industry. Thankfully, it seems as if everyone has learned their lessons from the CPF/[gettech id="31044" t_name="UPF"] struggles and is attempting to coordinate activities, while ... » read more

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