The Hunt For A Low-Power PHY


Physics has been on the side of chipmakers throughout most of the lifetime of [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"], but when dealing with the world outside the chip, physics is working against them. Pushing data at ever-faster rates through boards and systems consumes increasing amounts of power, but the power budget for chips has not been increasing. Could chips be constrained by their int... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synapse Design acquired Asilicon, a design services firm based in Ranchi Jharkhand, India. Through the acquisition, Synapse Design adds a second design center in India and gains an additional 80 engineers. "The focus of the Ranchi office will be to provide lower-cost offshore design center services for our customer's designs targeting 7- and 10-nm process technology," said Satish Bag... » read more

The Hidden Costs Of Security


There is no argument these days among chipmakers that security needs to be implemented at every level. So why isn't it happening? The answer is more complex than companies pinching pennies, although that is certainly a factor for some chips. The reality, though, is security carries a price for every facet of semiconductor design—power, performance and area. And the impact reaches much furt... » read more

The Problem With Clocks


The synchronous digital design paradigm has enabled us to design circuits that are well controlled, but that is only true if the clocks themselves are well controlled. While overdesign techniques ensured that to be the case in early ASIC development, designs today cannot afford such luxuries. As we strive for lower power and higher operating frequencies, the clock has become a critical desig... » read more

Why You Need ASIL Certified Processor IP For Automotive Safety Applications


As the electronics content in automotive safety-related systems continues to grow, there are also an increasing number of new entrants into the automotive semiconductor market. To achieve automotive safety certification, specialized hardware and software is required. With this competitive pressure and consumer demand for safer vehicles, it is more important than ever to focus on cost savings an... » read more

Electric Vehicles Set The Pace


Electric vehicles are leading the charge for innovation in automotive electronics. Companies that invested and embraced the challenge of EVs are besting their less-nimble, less-open-minded engineering cohorts. Semiconductors and embedded computers have been controlling the dashboard, mirrors, seats, heating and cooling for years. But with EVs, engineering teams are starting to tackle tas... » read more

Building Secure Software At Enterprise Scale


The cost of finding and remediating a software defect reduces dramatically the earlier it is found in the development life cycle. This is not new news. What is new news is an approach that builds security into the development process in a way that is easy for developers to adopt, without slowing down their workflow. Download the paper to learn how you can: Prevent common bugs and flaw... » read more

Blog Review: April 12


Cadence's Paul McLellan discusses the legal concerns around autonomous vehicles, emotion-based driver monitoring, and the role of LiDAR, from the CASPA Symposium on Autonomous Driving. The IEEE Design & Test's Magdy Abadir interviews Mentor's Wally Rhines in a discussion ranging from EDA growth and its economics to the increasing complexity of verification. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi exa... » read more

Time For New Rules


Is Moore's Law dead? Brigadier General Paul Fredenburgh, commandant of the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, asked that question to four industry CEOs last week while visiting Silicon Valley with some of his students. He received four highly nuanced, if not different, answers. Left to right: Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence; Wally Rhines, Mentor Graphics; Simon Se... » read more

Self-Driving Cars Rattle Supply Chain


Automotive compute workloads are consolidating as carmakers push toward autonomous vehicles, but the changes necessary to make this all work are causing huge disruptions in an industry that has fine-tuned its supply chain over more than a century. Consolidation is essential for a variety of reasons, including efficiency of the computations, complexity management, and lower deployment costs. ... » read more

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