The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Know someone who deserves the Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to EDA? Nominations are open until June 30th. Tools, IP & Chips ARM debuted the Cortex-R8 processor, targeting mass storage devices and future 5G modems with a quad-core configuration and extended low-latency memory. Cadence's schematic design tool, OrCAD Capture, added the capability to export hierarc... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 17


While there have been successes for 3D-IC, the technology has stalled trying to move into the mainstream market, says Mentor's Michael White. So what has kept it from crossing the chasm? Synopsys' Robert Vamosi takes a look at the US government's latest efforts towards improving cybersecurity. Cadence's Paul McLellan discusses the importance of software-driven hardware verification and th... » read more

Why Power Modeling Is So Difficult


Power modeling has been talked about for years and promoted by EDA vendors and chipmakers as an increasingly important tool for advanced designs. But unlike hardware and software modeling, which have been proven to speed time to market for multiple generations of silicon, power modeling has some unique problems that are more difficult to solve. Despite continued development in this field, po... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) and GlobalFoundries announced the establishment of a new Advanced Patterning and Productivity Center (APPC). The $500 million, 5-year program will accelerate the introduction of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technologies into manufacturing. The center is located at the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) in Albany, N.Y. -------... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Imagination's Sir Hossein Yassaie stepped down as Chief Executive, and Andrew Heath, one of the non-executive directors, has been appointed Interim Chief Executive. As part of a major restructuring, the company will also sell Pure, its consumer electronics business. Mentor Graphics' Embedded Linux platform has been updated to Yocto 2.0 and expanded to include new security enhancements and ad... » read more

Debug Becomes A Bigger Problem


The EDA industry has invested enormous amounts of time and energy on the verification process, including new languages, new tools, new class libraries, new methodologies. But the one part of the cycle that defines that type of automation is debug. Development teams are spending half of their time in the debug process and the problem is growing. Part of the reason is that design and debug are... » read more

Adventures In Assembly


With so few [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"] designs — if any — today designed completely new from the ground up, the assembly task is an extremely important one to get right. [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"] components must be put together optimally and efficiently to perfectly match the application requirements, which is complex and intricately nuanced. How companies approach IP varies signif... » read more

Thermal Damage To Chips Widens


Heat is becoming a much bigger problem for semiconductor and system design, fueled by higher density and the increasing use of complex chips in markets such as automotive, where reliability is measured in decade-long increments. In the past, heat typically was handled by mechanical engineers, who figured out where to put heat sinks, fans, or holes to funnel heat out of a chassis. But as more... » read more

Power-Performance-Thermal


People like me are challenged in the culinary department. We believe that all we have to do is put the meat, vegetables, sauce and everything else in the recipe into the crockpot and a few hours later, out comes dinner. We (desperately) believe that we can dump the ingredients into a Ninja blender and get a healthy, tasty shake in a few minutes. (I have been politely informed that it is NOT the... » read more

Powerful New Standard


In December the IEEE released the latest version of the 1801 specification, entitled the IEEE standard for design and verification of low-power integrated circuits. Most people know it as UPF, or the Unified Power Format. That was the name the first version of it held while being developed within Accellera. The standard provides a way to specify the power intent associated with a design, enabli... » read more

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