The Power Of 3D


By Cheryl Ajluni Much to the dismay of anyone who recently splurged on a new Blu-ray disk player or flat-panel HDTV, 3D stereoscopic content has become the talk of the town or, in this case, the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. Sure, we’ve been down this road before. After all, 3D is nothing new. But it now appears ready to explode into the home in the form of 3D television (Figure 1). Bol... » read more

Low-Power Architectures Go Mainstream


By Pallab Chatterjee Until recently, low power engineering has been defined by the automated use of EDA tools in the design flow to help cut back on peak dynamic power. The new generation of mobile and video products has forced a change in that methodology. There are two other fast rising architectural approaches. The first is multicore, which is prevalent in new product introductions fr... » read more

Why Intel Is Settling With AMD


There’s more to the Intel-AMD settlement than meets the eye. While Intel will be paying out $1.2 billion to AMD as part of the settlement—and that’s a large chunk of money in anyone’s book—it’s a relatively small price to pay when it’s amortized over 10 years and can open the door to even bigger markets for Intel. And that’s just what this is, a down payment on the future. ... » read more

Outsourcing’s New Face


By Ed Sperling As the semiconductor industry digs out from one of the worst downturns in decades, the business of semiconductor design and engineering is changing. While the architecture and features are still being developed by chip companies, the actual work of developing the chip increasingly is being done by third parties. Outsourcing is hardly new concept in business. In the early pa... » read more

Moore’s Law vs. Low Power


By Ed Sperling Moore’s Law and low-power engineering are natural-born enemies, and this dissension is becoming more obvious at each new process node as the two forces are pushed closer together. The basic problem is that shrinking transistors and line widths between wires opens up far more real estate on a chip, which encourages chip architects and marketing chiefs at chipmakers to take... » read more

Why The Chartered Semiconductor Acquisition Matters


The acquisition of Chartered by a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi government may sound like a rather brash investment, but our sources say it’s all part of a rather audacious plan that began unfolding one day after the deal to jointly run AMD’s foundry was hatched. In fact, this is anything but an impulsive buy by a country swimming in oil profits. The plan is actually to inte... » read more

More Cores, Different Approaches


By Ed Sperling The general consensus among software developers is that some applications will never be able to take advantage of multiple cores, but that certainly doesn’t mean system designers can’t figure out ways to use more cores. Nor does it mean that all cores are created equal. The picture that is emerging from multiple chipmakers shows the following trends: More cores have lim... » read more

Hot Chips 2009: It’s All About Multicore And Low-Power


By Pallab Chatterjee The game has changed for processors. The goal now is data throughput, not higher gigahertz and more watts. That shift dominated the presentations at the Hot Chips conference this week. In previous years, the theme was higher single-core performance, more power and smaller geometries processes. This year it was all about multi-core and multi-power options as the realities ... » read more

The Argument For Low Power In The Data Center


By Ann Steffora Mutschler For budgetary and ‘green’ motives, enterprise IT customers are demanding higher energy efficiency from their servers. This ultimately rests on the shoulders of the processor designer as the MPU is a significant source of power usage. Interestingly, the hidden and ugly truth is that for most data center managers, the cost of electricity for that data center is... » read more

First Down On The 40nm Line


The race to 40nm is over. Some chipmakers are already there, taping out designs and implementing IP that has already been qualified at the 40nm process. When exactly volume production begins and when yields improve is a matter of conjecture. TSMC so far is the only major foundry actively using the 40nm process, which is a half-node beyond 45nm. But the Common Platform already has briefed a... » read more

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