Blog Review: March 16


A bacterium that chows down on plastic could be a boon to reducing our huge piles of plastic waste, in this week's top five tech picks from Ansys' Bill Vandermark. Plus, silicon photonics got one step closer, keeping an eye on new neurons, and getting around with magnets. Can semiconductors be open sourced? Rambus' Aharon Etengoff considers what that would take, the potential impact on the I... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Legal A federal court jury favored Synopsys in a 2013 lawsuit alleging that ATopTech violated copyright by copying elements of the command set for Synopsys' PrimeTime static timing analysis product. Synopsys was awarded $30.4 million in damages. ATopTech plans to contest the verdict, stating that other issues in the case remain to be decided. Tools Aldec unveiled the latest version of ... » read more

IP Risk Sharing


For most people within the semiconductor industry, managing risk involves making the right product decisions that will enable a company to be profitable, and ensuring the product is successfully produced within the necessary time window. In contrast, for products within high-risk areas such as medical and mil/aero, design often proceeds at a slower pace, using proven technologies and adopting l... » read more

Mixed-Signal Design Powers Ahead


Mixed-signal devices are at the heart of many advanced systems today because of the need to interact with the outside world, but designing and verifying these systems is getting harder. There are several reasons for this. First, almost all of these devices now have to be lower power than in the past, and in the analog space it's not as simple as just dialing down part of a block. Second, it ... » read more

Achieving Numerical Precision And Design Customization With Flexible Floating-Point IP


Floating-point operations in application-specific hardware have gained in popularity mostly because they are easier to use than fixed-point operations and they are a better match to numerical behavior in software algorithms. Fixed-point operations present design challenges in the definition of input/output ranges and internal precision for each operation. On the other hand, floating-point opera... » read more

How Many Cores? (Part 1)


The optimal number of processor cores in chip designs is becoming less obvious, in part due to new design and architectural options that make it harder to draw clear comparisons, and in part because just throwing more cores at a problem does not guarantee better performance. This is hardly a new problem, but it does have a sizable list of new permutations and variables—right-sized heteroge... » read more

Addressing Three Critical Challenges Of USB Type-C Implementation


As designers are create new products and system-on-chips (SoCs) with USB Type-C support, they need to be aware of datapath and hardware/software partitioning challenges. The SoC and system design must be partitioned to support the specification’s requirements for precision analog circuitry plus high voltage/high current switches, and Type-C management software must be partitioned to execute o... » read more

Blog Review: March 9


The world's largest floating solar farm will soon be complete – an array of 23,000 solar panels on a reservoir outside London. Also in this week's top five picks by Ansys' Justin Nescott, watching sharks from the sky is a drone's latest task, plus making music with a marble machine. Synopsys' Graham Etchells continues his series with a look at electromigration and its impacts on the FinFET... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mergers & Acquisitions Synopsys acquired WinterLogic, provider of fault simulation tools used in automotive, safety and security environments for the design and verification of advanced SoCs. In announcing the deal, Synopsys highlighted fault simulation as key for ISO 26262 compliance testing. Terms were not disclosed. IP & IoT Mentor Graphics unveiled the first entirely native... » read more

Powerful New Standard


In December 2015, the IEEE released the latest version of the 1801 specification, titled the IEEE standard for design and verification of low-power integrated circuits, but most people know it as UPF or the Unified Power Format. The standard provides a way to specify the power intent associated with a design. With it, a designer can define the various power states of the design and the contexts... » read more

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