Tech Talk: IoT Design Changes


eSilicon's Lisa Minwell talks with Semiconductor Engineering about what's needed to push Internet of Things designs down to the microwatt range, and how to bridge the gap between what's available today and what's needed for the future. [youtube vid= bk3BgtJnFpg] » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


First Solar announced that Apple has committed $848 million for clean energy from First Solar’s California Flats Solar Project in Monterey County, Calif. Apple will receive electricity from 130 megawatts (MW) AC of the solar project under a 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA), the largest agreement in the industry to provide clean energy to a commercial end user. Applied Materials repor... » read more

IoT Will Force New Memory Paradigm


There are two things in life that have always been true: One is that you can never be too rich, and second—at least since the dawn of the technological age—you can never have too much memory. But the memory truism is changing with the onset of the [getkc id="76" comment="Internet of Things"]. The next generation of memory for the IoT must meet a different set of metrics – smaller, smar... » read more

Darker Silicon


For the last several decades, integrated circuit manufacturers have focused their efforts on [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"], increasing transistor density at constant cost. For much of that time, Dennard’s Law also held: As the dimensions of a device go down, so does power consumption. Smaller transistors ran faster, used less power, and cost less. As most readers already know, howe... » read more

Digital TV: The Need For Speed


With CES just finishing up, I wanted to take a closer look at the changes in the digital TV market, and what affect those changes have on high performance memory and serial links. Just five years ago, the United States made the transition from analog to digital television. At the time, standard definition digital TV was common, with screens that contained 345 thousand pixels per frame. Recen... » read more

Designing the Right Architecture


Designing the right architecture of a multi-processor SoC for today's sophisticated electronic products is a challenging task. The most critical element for meeting the performance requirements of the entire system is the interconnect and memory architecture. These SoC infrastructure IP components are highly configurable and need to be customized to the communication needs of all the other modu... » read more

High-Performance Network Data-Packet Classification Using Embedded Content-Addressable Memory (TCAMs)


With port speeds exceeding 100Gbps, route lookups that are fundamental to all routers have relied on ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) to provide a lookup response within a clock cycle. However, TCAMs in discrete form are expensive, consume a lot of power, compete for precious real estate on the printed circuit board (PCB), and in some applications lack required flexibility. Embeddin... » read more

What You Don’t Know About Consumer Memory


I hear a lot of chatter about the memory markets and their fast growth. The question I like to pose to people is, "Which memory (DRAM) segment has grown faster over the last three years, servers or consumer?" The answer may surprise you. The correct answer, according to the latest IHS DRAM Market Tracker Database, is consumer. Since the beginning of 2012, the consumer DRAM market has grow... » read more

Hybrid Memory Cube – Ready For Prime Time


With the release this week of Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) 2.0, designers can get their hands on mature, standards-based IP that can be used to significantly scale the performance of servers and data centers. HMC offers bandwidths up to 320 GB/s – 12X that of standard memory solutions like DDR4 – while consuming significantly less power. These benefits are too significant to ignore for ASIC, So... » read more

Data Center Power Consumption: What Effect Does Memory Have?


Data Centers now account for 3% of the worldwide power consumption, up from an estimated 1.5% just a few years ago. Data centers have been getting more efficient, but the efficiency has been hidden by the large growth in the number of data centers. The question that was recently posed to me: What effect does memory have on data center power consumption? I’ll cut straight to the chase. T... » read more

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