tag: Apple

Speed Sells
By Ed Sperling - 13 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

The good news is that the new iPhone battery lasts at least as long as the old one. The bad news is that Apple hasn’t offered double battery life and equivalent performance as an option for mobile users that need extended times between charges. They’re not alone, of course. At the Intel Developer Forum this week, Intel Chief Product Officer Dadi Perlmutter talked about voice and gesture-... » read more

The Rise Of The Power Architect
By Ed Sperling - 09 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Call them power czars, power gurus or power architects, this role within design teams is gaining importance with the need to understand, manage and control the power budget throughout the entire design process. As such, power architects are in high demand today with power architecture teams doubling in size within a year or two. Driving the need for this highly s... » read more

Disaggregation And Re-aggregation
By Ed Sperling - 02 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

The proliferation of platforms, subsystems and IP of any sort, as well as the move to stack die in 2.5D configurations, will force a realignment of the ecosystem. For the moment, it appears that vertically integrated companies such as Apple and Samsung have a distinct advantage. It remains to be seen just how substantial that advantage really is, however. As chips become a collection of more... » read more

The Trouble With Models
By Ed Sperling - 28 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Models and modeling concepts seem to be on the tip of every tongue these days. Once the promise of sparking true ESL design, the use of system-level models has settled into something more like enabling software development. There is also talk of leveraging models across the supply chain, but is this really possible yet? The concept of doing this incremental refinem... » read more

The Next Frontiers
By Ed Sperling - 24 May, 2012 - Comments: 0

One of the interesting things about technology is that, at least from the outside, it’s hard to tell what’s actually changing. That’s not true on the inside, of course, where radical shifts are under way. The next big push in smart phones will be much greater intelligence. In the iPhone, Siri was just the tip of the iceberg. Future versions are likely to be much more interesting. Add ... » read more

What Needs To Be Fixed
By Ed Sperling - 20 Apr, 2012 - Comments: 0

Some incredible engineering feats at the nano level—particularly below 40nm—are making their way into production chips. Even creating a sub-micron chip in the first place is a testament to the advances in semiconductor engineering. Turning off large sections of the chip and implementing techniques such as voltage and frequency scaling, power gating, multiple voltage rails and islands, multi... » read more

Experts vs. Expertise
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The trend in IC design—particularly for large, complex SoCs—is specialization among engineers. There are specialists for layout, for verification, for DFM, for test, and for software, among other things. And there are experts who have a smattering of many of the pieces and can oversee the integration and testing. Power is different. Because power affects every part of a d... » read more

Converge And Consolidate
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

Electronics has always been about convergence, and convergence inevitably spawns new companies while forcing consolidation of others. What used to be in a device moved to a board, from a board there has been a perpetual push to put things in a chip. At one point, circa 2000, analog companies claimed that mixed signal chips were a thing of the past and that there would be separate analog chip... » read more

Ambient Computing: Interdependencies Rule
By Ed Sperling - 26 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Ambient computing: Just the concept conjures up images of a Star Trek-like ‘Computer’ that is ever at the ready, awaiting a query at any moment, and which can discern as well as perform significant tasks. While Apple’s Siri gets there partway, it is significant because the concepts that make the technology possible behind the scenes draw upon a multidisciplinary... » read more

Credit Deficit
By Ed Sperling - 09 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

One of the common complaints from around the semiconductor industry is that design teams don’t get recognized. Appreciation comes readily to brands such as Apple or Samsung, but it is several levels of abstraction removed from the companies that develop the processors, let alone the tools, materials, methodologies or processes that make those processors possible. Worse, energy efficiency ... » read more

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