Blog Review: Jan. 2


Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as Uhnder CEO Manju Hegde explains the most critical issues impacting sensor development for autonomous vehicles and why new radar systems are needed to fill in the gaps. Synopsys' Fred Bals shares key points from the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's investigation into the massive Equifax data breach that show how relatively small secu... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Gyrfalcon Technology released a 22nm AI accelerator ASIC chip with embedded MRAM. The Lightspeeur 2802M includes 40MB of memory to support large or multiple AI models, such as image classification and voice identification, within a single chip. Manufactured by TSMC, target applications include IoT endpoints, cloud solutions, and autonomous vehicles. Arm expanded its line of automotive-focuse... » read more

Designing For Ultra-Low-Power IoT Devices


Optimizing designs for power is becoming the top design challenge in battery-driven IoT devices, boxed in by a combination of requirements such as low cost, minimum performance and functionality, as well as the need for at least some of the circuits to be always on. Power optimization is growing even more complicated as AI inferencing moves from the data center to the edge. Even simple... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 19


Cadence's Dave Pursley checks out the state of high-level synthesis and notes that 39% of survey respondents expect to be using it for the majority of designs within three years. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls digs into how to measure RTOS performance with a focus on interrupt latency. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding chats with Chenxi Wang of Rain Capital to find what the security landscape will... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 12


Mentor's Harry Foster checks out how much time and effort is spent on verification of FPGAs and points to the increasing demand for verification engineers. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into IC Insights' year-end report to see how some of the top semiconductor companies stack up. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns that air gaps, a valuable barrier against cyberattacks, are disappearing from ... » read more

SMART Fracture


With the new unstructured mesh method (UMM) in ANSYS Mechanical, engineers can reduce preprocessing time by employing UMM’s automatically generated all-tetrahedral (tet) mesh for crack fronts, while achieving the same high-fidelity results as a simulation run with the ideal hex mesh configuration. Meshing time has been reduced from up to several days to a few minutes. Using UMM, ANSYS has ... » read more

The Growing Promise Of Printed Electronics


Printing electronics using conductive ink rather than lithography is starting to move out of the research phase, with chipmakers now looking at how to commercialize this technology across a broad range of sensor applications. Unlike traditional semiconductors, which use tiny wires as circuits, printed electronics rely on conductive inks and often flexible films, although they can be printed ... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 5


Mentor's Harry Foster digs into verification effectiveness in FPGA projects and what it means that so many non-trivial bugs escape into production. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out an effort to integrate photonics with CMOS and find the tradeoffs in three different approaches, plus the view of photonics as applied to military aircraft. Synopsys' Richard Solomon shares some highlights on... » read more

Why Chips Die


Semiconductor devices contain hundreds of millions of transistors operating at extreme temperatures and in hostile environments, so it should come as no surprise that many of these devices fail to operate as expected or have a finite lifetime. Some devices never make it out of the lab and many others die in the fab. It is hoped that most devices released into products will survive until they be... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A SMIT Holdings acquired S2C, a provider of FPGA prototyping hardware and software as well as interfaces and accessories, for $19 million, plus up to US$2 million in milestone based payments to the key management team. S2C was founded in 2003. SMIT, based in Hong Kong, makes pay TV broadcasting access and mobile point-of-sale payment systems for the Chinese market. Tools & IP Syn... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →