Blog Review: May 24


Mentor's Andrew Patterson questions who should have control over who sees the vast amounts of data generated by automobiles and how it is used. In a series of posts, Cadence's Meera Collier considers philosophical questions from the angle of computer science. Synopsys' Eric Huang has a lighthearted look at today's world of robots. Rambus' Aharon Etengoff points to Director of National ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Consultancy Sondrel acquired IMGworks, formerly the design services unit of Imagination. Sondrel says it plans to focus on design services for ADAS systems, AI, and machine vision and learning devices. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Tools Cadence expanded its formal verification platform, JasperGold, adding linting and clock domain crossing apps that address RTL signoff ... » read more

Maintaining Power Profiles At 10/7nm


Understanding power consumption in detail is now a must-have of electronic design at 10nm and below, putting more pressure on SoC verification to ensure a device not only works, but meets the power budget. As part of this, the complete system must be run in a realistic manner — at the system-level — when the design and verification teams are looking at the effects of power during hardwar... » read more

Blog Review: May 17


Synopsys' Robert Vamosi digs into last Friday's massive ransomware infection that impacted the UK health system, a Spanish telecom, and many other organizations running unpatched Windows – and whether there's a second version out there. Cadence's Paul McLellan reports on the latest developments and future of FD-SOI from the SOI Silicon Valley Symposium. Mentor's Joe Hupcey III chats wit... » read more

Moore’s Law: Toward SW-Defined Hardware


Pushing to the next process node will continue to be a primary driver for some chips—CPUs, FPGAs and some ASICS—but for many applications that approach is becoming less relevant as a metric for progress. Behind this change is a transition from using customized software with generic hardware, to a mix of specialized, heterogeneous hardware that can achieve better performance with less ene... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys debuted a tool to replay RTL simulation data on a gate-level netlist for power analysis the company says is accurate within 5% of signoff. The tool, PowerReplay, is design to be used in combination with PrimeTime PX gate-level power analysis for earlier and faster generation of gate-level switching data. IP ClioSoft launched a design reuse ecosystem for searching and com... » read more

Power Challenges At 10nm And Below


Current density is becoming much more problematic at 10nm and beyond, increasing the amount of power management that needs to be incorporated into each chip and boosting both design costs and time to market. Current per unit of area has been rising since 90nm, forcing design teams to leverage a number of power-related strategies such as [getkc id="143" kc_name="dynamic voltage and frequency... » read more

Closing The Loop On Power Optimization


[getkc id="108" kc_name="Power"] has become a significant limiter for the capabilities of a chip at finer geometries, and making sure that performance is maximized for a given amount of power is becoming a critical design issue. But that is easier said than done, and the tools and methodologies to overcome the limitations of power are still in the early definition stages. The problem spans a... » read more

Building One Interface Subsystem For Multiple IoT SoCs


When designing SoCs for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, designers quickly realize that their most efficient use of resources will result in chips that can address multiple end applications. Consumer products require connectivity or edge devices, and networking or enterprise companies are broadening their reach to home networking and cloud services, like remote processing, that complement... » read more

Analog’s Unfair Disadvantage


We live in an analog world, and yet digital has become the technology of choice. Mixed-signal solutions that used to contain significant amounts of analog, with just a small amount of digital signal processing, have migrated into systems where the analog to digital conversion happens at the very first opportunity. There are several reasons for this, and some of them build upon themselves. [g... » read more

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