A Balancing Act


By Ann Steffora Mutschler If you stay current on data center trends, you are well-versed on the fact that Intel reported last June energy proportionality has effectively doubled server efficiency and workload scaling beyond what Moore’s Law predicted. What does this have to do with power management of SoCs? Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys, said tha... » read more

Raising The Stakes For IP


By Ed Sperling As the amount of IP in an SoC increases, so do the number of players who want to strengthen their position in this market. The big acquisitions that began several years ago over time have proved to be just opening salvos—something that was impossible to predict when this shift began. Synopsys’ purchase of Virage Logic and Cadence’s purchase of Denali, both of which occu... » read more

The Growing Integration Challenge


By Ed Sperling As the number of processors and the amount of memory and IP on a chip continues to skyrocket, so does the challenge for integrating all of this stuff on a single die—or even multiple dies in the same package. There are a number of reasons why it’s getting more difficult to make all of these IP blocks work together. First of all, nothing ever stands still in design. As a r... » read more

Embedded Computing Down To Two Major Camps


By Pallab Chatterjee The 2011 CES show was highlighted by the large number of tablet computers and mobile devices that support Internet access. The form factor for these devices is based on use models, but the computing capabilities are based on the power and operational life between charges. The platforms are drawing diving lines between x86 cores vs ARM cores, and CPUs vs GPUs. While on t... » read more

Embedded Computing Down To Two Major Camps


By Pallab Chatterjee The 2011 CES show was highlighted by the large number of tablet computers and mobile devices that support Internet access. The form factor for these devices is based on use models, but the computing capabilities are based on the power and operational life between charges. The platforms are drawing diving lines between x86 cores vs ARM cores, and CPUs vs GPUs. While on t... » read more

Low-Power Architectures Go Mainstream


By Pallab Chatterjee Until recently, low power engineering has been defined by the automated use of EDA tools in the design flow to help cut back on peak dynamic power. The new generation of mobile and video products has forced a change in that methodology. There are two other fast rising architectural approaches. The first is multicore, which is prevalent in new product introductions fr... » read more

Taming The Multicore Beast


By Ed Sperling Multicore chips are here to stay. Now what? That question is echoing up and down the ranks of tools vendors, design engineers, software developers and even among people who measure the performance and efficiency of semiconductors. There is now a Multicore Expo and a Multicore Association that includes a who’s who of electronics. And there are lots of working groups developing... » read more

One Design, Many Products


By Pallab Chatterjee The tightening worldwide economy finally has forced the consumer products arena to adopt an aggressive single-SKU mentality for their products. This means companies are now making a single standard product that can be sold into multiple applications. This marks a radical shift in the way products are being designed, a direction that makes the design and development proces... » read more

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