New Market Expectations For 2015


This year more than 26 people provided predictions for 2015. Most of these came from the EDA industry, so the results may be rather biased. However, ecosystems are coming closer together in many parts of the semiconductor food chain, meaning that the EDA companies often can see what is happening in dependent industries and in the system design houses. Thus their predictions may have already res... » read more

New Challenges For Wearables


The earliest recorded mention of a wristwatch dates back to the late 1500s, but it really began gaining adherents in Great Britain’s Boer War campaign as a way of synchronizing military actions beyond the line of sight. Strapping a pocket watch to a horse or a camel simply didn’t work, and pulling it out of a jacket pocket was not only inconvenient, it was dangerous. Advertised as a “c... » read more

Higher Frequencies Mean More Memory


As SoCs get more complex, whether due to higher frequencies or adding more functionality, there is a spillover effect on bandwidth, [getkc id="22" kc_name="memory"] and power. There is no simple way to just turn up the clock frequency in a complex [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"]. That relatively straightforward objective will likely require more power domains, more cores, more ways to move sig... » read more

Designing For Automotive


As cars include an increasing amount of electronics and electronics subsystems, the number of design challenges involving reliability, cost and power are on the rise. “Reliability tops the list of concerns for the design team because when you put these electronics in, you must know if they are going to operate efficiently by themselves," said Aveek Sarkar, vice president of product enginee... » read more

IP Design Essentials For Reliability And SoC Integration


IP is integral to every SoC design. The need for ubiquitous connectivity has pushed the threshold for content in SoCs even beyond the tenets of Moore’s Law. Technology scaling has not only enabled the delivery of increased performance and reduced power, but also rich content through the integration of a wide range of IPs such as radio devices, CMOS image sensors, MEMs, etc., into a single ... » read more

New Challenges For Wearables


It was Dick Tracy’s wristwatch communicator that triggered the public’s appetite for wearable electronics. Introduced in a 1946 syndicated comic strip, the idea was so compelling that it inspired the release of hundreds of wrist-based devices ranging from walkie-talkies to calculators to GPS trackers, heartbeat and movement monitors. Yet despite the public’s fascination with this kind of ... » read more

Industry Scorecard For 2014


At the end of last year, Semiconductor Engineering asked the industry about the developments they expected to see in 2014. If you care to refresh your memory, they were categorized under markets, semiconductors and development tools. Now it is time to look back and see how accurate those predictions were and where they fell short. Markets The obvious trend, at the beginning of the year, wa... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Cadence rolled out a use-case scenario verification tool that automates some test development that has been done manually in the past. The new tool accelerates development of software-driven tests and debug to ferret out complex SoC-level bugs. Cadence claims a 10X productivity improvement. Mentor Graphics uncorked a new version of its verification IP for PCI Express. The new IP decre... » read more

Signal And Power Integrity Cross Paths


Signal integrity and power integrity historically have been relatively independent issues, and engineers with expertise in one area generally operate independently of the other. But as more power domains are added to conserve energy and allow more features, as voltages are reduced to save battery life, and as dynamic power becomes more of a concern at advanced nodes, these worlds are suddenly m... » read more

Problems Lurk In SoC Boundaries


Interfaces always have been a problem, because only rarely does anyone have responsibility for them. Responsibilities generally are tied to functional blocks with the prevailing notion that if all blocks do the right thing, they will also behave correctly when brought together. Design teams that believe this eventually find out the fallacy of this assumption. To make matters worse, these are of... » read more

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