The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Standards Si2 is launching a new project to develop a new power modeling standard, focusing on estimation of power consumption more easily and more accurately throughout the design process, especially during the earliest stages. The approved specification will be contributed to the IEEE P2416 Standards Working Group for industry-wide distribution. IP Synopsys extended automotive safety... » read more

No More Straight Lines


Shrinking features on a chip is no longer the only way forward, and in an increasing number of designs and markets, it is no longer the best way forward. Power and performance are generally better dealt with using different architectures and microarchitectures, and all of those provide the potential to reduce silicon area (cost). Cramming more transistors on a die and working around leakage... » read more

Power-Centric Chip Architectures


As traditional scaling runs out of steam, new chip architectures are emerging with power as the starting point. While this trend has been unfolding for some time, it is getting an extra boost and sense of urgency as design teams weigh a growing number of design challenges and options across a variety of new markets. Among the options are [getkc id="196" kc_name="multi-patterning"] and [getkc... » read more

Save Power And Area By Eliminating Redundant Resets


Resets initialize hardware by forcing it into a known state, either on design start up or to recover from an error. In today’s SoC designs, it is not uncommon to see designs with millions of registers that have resets. Unfortunately, many of these resets are redundant. Leaving these unnecessary register resets in the design leads to increased power consumption, excess area, and routing conges... » read more

Bringing a Sharper World In Focus With Virtual UHD Verification


UHD-4K designs require a verification solution that can handle longer, larger frames, faster frame rates, richer colors, wider contrasts, and highly complex chips. Emulation has the speed, capacity, and performance to churn very quickly through the massive amounts of data and long sequences required for verification. Visualization tools are needed to understand and debug what’s going on in UH... » read more

Blog Review: May 11


Cadence's Christine Young presents two views on the challenges of teaching physical design and some creative approaches to get students involved in solving complex problems. In his latest video, Mentor's Colin Walls ponders the mysteries of the increment operator in C/C++ and how to use it most efficiently. Synopsys' Anand Shirahatti, Mohd Adil Khan, and Jamshed Alum look at two key featu... » read more

Grappling With IoT Security


By Ed Sperling & Ernest Worthman As the IoT begins to take shape, the security implications of connecting devices and systems to the Internet and what needs to be done to secure them are coming into focus, as well. There is growing consensus across the semiconductor industry that many potential security holes remain, with new ones surfacing all the time. But there also is widespread r... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Standards The IEEE launched the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), effectively setting the industry agenda for future silicon benchmarking and adding metrics that are relevant to specific markets rather than creating the fastest general-purpose processing elements at the smallest process node. For more on the IRDS, check out Ed Sperling's analysis. Accellera's SystemC A... » read more

Autonomous Vehicle Disruptions Ahead


The promise of autonomous driving is a significant one, with far fewer fatalities from vehicle crashes — down from 30,000 annually — topping the list of benefits. Beyond that, autonomous driving also promises increased convenience and productivity and less troublesome commutes. But autonomous driving also pushes automotive technology into uncharted areas. There is little to fall back on ... » read more

Perspectives on the Future of Mobility from SAE World Congress 2016


The discussions rage on, and I'm not talking about any election banter, which is growing tiresome. (I’ll note here that election cycles back home in the U.K. last just a month or so.) I’m talking about the future of mobility, the way you and I get around in the world — a hot topic last month at SAE World Congress. Along with much of the rest of the automotive engineering community, I w... » read more

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