Why Batteries Don’t Last Long Enough


By Pallab Chatterjee While there have been great strides in process scaling for power reduction on a per-gate level for mobile devices, a large part of the power is still consumed by the power amplifier, filter and analog mux arrangement from the systems. Most of the logic systems have benefited from scaling to the sub-40nm technology range, which reduces standby and operating power by seve... » read more

Building A Better Team


One-On-One with IDT CEO Ted Tewskbury: How IDT is bridging the analog and digital engineering worlds with a mixed-signal team approach.   [youtube vid=TRfJ5a3WJrw] » read more

Custom IC Design: They Call This Progress?


By Ed Sperling For decades, analog and digital engineers have lived in completely separate worlds. The lines are blurring between those worlds, though, in complex SoCs. So far, the transition has been difficult, and most engineers predict it will get worse at future process nodes. The basic problem is that each world has functioned independently of the other from the start. They use different... » read more

Making Analog Easier


By Clive "Max" Maxfield I'm a digital design engineer by trade. All of those wibbly-wobbly effects that are characteristic of the analog domain make me nervous, and if something makes me nervous I tend to look the other way and hope it will go away. But analog isn’t going anywhere. On the contrary, the increasing amounts of analog/mixed-signal (AMS) functionality that feature in today's Sy... » read more

Exclusive Research: What’s Happening With Third-Party IP


Analog and mixed signal IP began closing the gap with digital core IP in design explorations in the first two months of this year, a clear sign that multicore systems on chip have emerged as the dominant semiconductor model and that the architecture requires both types of IP. While it’s too early to tell this year what effect that will have on overall design activity—the economy is the rea... » read more

Thinking Digital To Design Analog, And Vice Versa


By Ed Sperling Until several years ago, analog was a world apart from digital. Analog engineers could comfortably avoid many of the issues of Moore’s Law, viewing it as a costly bad habit with an equally bad outcome. Most analog engineers gloated privately that they could still develop chips at 250nm, or at worst 130nm, while their digital counterparts were struggling to keep up with is... » read more

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