How Long Will FinFETs Last?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss how long [getkc id="185" kc_name="FinFET"]s will last and where we will we go next with Vassilios Gerousis, Distinguished Engineer at [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Juan Rey, Sr. Director of Engineering for Calibre R&D at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Kelvin Low, Senior Director, Foundry Marketing at [getentity id="2286... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


IP Synopsys rolled out logic library and embedded memory IP for the Mie Fujitsu 40nm low-power process. The process has 50% lower power consumption compared with previous process technologies. Deals Rambus' Cryptography Research Division won a deal to run the Secure Content Storage Association's cryptographic key management center. The keys are used in SCSA-enabled devices for securing vid... » read more

Making Hardware Design More Agile


Semiconductor engineering sat down to whether changes are needed in hardware design methodology, with Philip Gutierrez, ASIC/FPGA design manager in [getentity id="22306" comment="IBM"]'s FlashSystems Storage Group; Dennis Brophy, director of strategic business development at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing of the System ... » read more

Rethinking Differentiation


Differentiation is becoming more difficult, more time-consuming, and in some cases much more expensive for chipmakers. The traditional metrics of faster performance, lower power and less area/cost, which are leftovers from the PC era, no longer are a guarantee of success despite the fact that they are still baseline metrics for many designs. Even new metrics such as ecosystem completeness, w... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


M&A Tessera boosted its 2.5D and 3D-IC capabilities with the acquisition of Ziptronix. The $39 million cash purchase adds a low-temperature wafer bonding technology platform, which has been licensed to Sony for volume production of CMOS image sensors. Numbers Semico Research forecasts that the SoC market will approach $200 billion by 2019. According to its analysis, average die are... » read more

Software Driving More Hardware Designs


The influence of software engineers is growing inside of chip and systems companies, reversing a decades-old trend of matching the software to the fastest or most power-efficient hardware and raising as-yet unanswered questions about what will change in SoC design. The shift is particularly evident in chips developed for high-volume markets such as mobile phones and tablets. It's also happen... » read more

Embedded Vision Becoming Ubiquitous


Embedded vision is becoming a topic of heated conversation thanks to the emergence of neural networks and their ability to make computer systems learn by example. Neural networks are a very different kind of processing element compared to the other kind of processors we have in the IP arsenal today in that they are not programmed in the same manner. They do not have a stream of instructions... » read more

The Trouble With Abstractions


Ask chip engineers about the value of abstractions and you're likely to get a spectrum of answers. While abstractions help in seeing the big picture on complex designs, the data for performance and power needs to be annotated from detailed information the engineering team may obtain later in the design flow. There is valuable information that can come from using abstractions correctly. And ... » read more

Hardware-Software Co-Design


A famous electronics company recently launched a new TV and web commercial emphasizing the importance of designing hardware and software together. (You can view the video here.) It is interesting to see that we have evolved to a state where a phone maker actually feels compelled to talk about the technical details of how the phone was designed. Rather than focusing on the screen resolution,... » read more

What Happened To ESL


Electronic system level ([getkc id="48" kc_name="ESL"]) is a design methodology idea that gained steam in the last 20 years centered mainly around the idea of using higher levels of abstraction to define and implement an electronic design. It was defined and promoted by industry analyst Gary Smith, then at Gartner-Dataquest, and so much has been written on this topic over the years that ESL ... » read more

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