IP Design Essentials For Power Integrity


Smart connectivity is the new mantra of today – the ability to connect to anything, anywhere and at any time. With such technology enablement, low power is not a choice but an expectation. Whether it is a connected device, or a system that is part of the infrastructure, they are driven to integrate various functionality such as high speed computing, high-speed memory, memory interfaces, radio... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Power Problem


By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss the issues in low-power design with Vic Kulkarni, general manager and senior vice president of the RTL business unit, Apache Design Solutions; Pete Hardee, solutions marketing manager at Cadence; Bernard Murphy, chief technology officer at Atrenta, and Bhavna Agrawal, manager of circuit design automation at IBM. What follows are excerpt... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Power Problem


Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss a broad swath of power issues with Vic Kulkarni, general manager and senior vice president of the RTL business unit, Apache Design Solutions; Pete Hardee, solutions marketing manager at Cadence; Bernard Murphy, chief technology officer at Atrenta, and Bhavna Agrawal, manager of circuit design automation at IBM. What follows are excerpts of that conversa... » read more

Special Report: Using FPGAs For 3D Stacking


By Ed Sperling Xilinx is developing a 3D architecture for its FPGAs and Actel has been approached by SoC makers to use its flash-based FPGA as a layer in a 3D IC stack. Both approaches could radically alter the fundamental equation about the tradeoffs between FPGAs and ASICs—particularly the power and performance overhead normally associated with programmable logic. Xilinx declined to com... » read more

A Shock To The System


By Ed Sperling Electrostatic discharge used to be something confined to the I/O level, and often not even as part of the core design. But at 45nm and beyond, ESD is capable of wreaking havoc across a chip, blowing out transistors, wires and the insulation between them. What was once considered a sideshow in SoC development is becoming a central and critical issue at advanced nodes. The good... » read more