Collaboration Grows


By Ed Sperling A series of recent announcements by the Big Three EDA vendors and their well-known partners from across the disaggregated SoC ecosystem is lending new credence to the impact of collaboration. While IDMs such as Apple, Intel, Samsung and IBM continue to blaze their own trail, developing in-house tools, methodologies, processes and chips, fabless companies working with foundrie... » read more

What A Difference A Decade Makes


By Tiffany Sparks Lately, I find myself in a reflective mood, pondering what’s changed over the past 10 years. Of course, with the 10th anniversary of 9/11 earlier this month, there’s been intense focus on what the world was like 10 years ago and what has changed since that fateful day: the thousands of lives lost, first on 9/11, then the lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq; the geo-poli... » read more

The Other Green


The human memory is rather short when it comes to certain things. Energy efficiency is one of them. While they may cringe at paying $4 a gallon for gasoline to fill of their car, they were convinced that drastic measures were necessary when gas hit $1 a gallon. And while consumers collectively account for the vast percentage of energy consumed, individually they don’t consume enough to mak... » read more

Who’s In Control?


By Ed Sperling A power shift is under way across the SoC world that ultimately determine who wins the business, who gets the biggest share and what technologies are ultimately used to get there. Complexity has reached a point where being able to pull the necessary pieces from a disaggregated supply chain is becoming much more difficult. That helps explain why all three of the major EDA comp... » read more

Engineering’s Growing Blacklist


The number of system-level design flaws is rising, and they’re not just little mistakes. These are high-profile errors that are making headlines all over the globe. While it’s debatable whether Toyota’s problem was a hardware or software design glitch, the simple fact is there was a design flaw somewhere. That’s true for the BP Gulf of Mexico leak, regardless of who’s responsible f... » read more

Software Drives Design Requirements


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As product design evolves to contain more and more software, that software—including the applications that run on the device—is now starting to drive design and process requirements. This change is causing ripples throughout the semiconductor industry, driving evolutionary thinking about where to go next. OEMs have taken notice of a new dynamic and want to capt... » read more

One On One With South Korea’s CTO


By Ed Sperling Chang-Gyu Hwang, national chief technology officer for South Korea, sat down with Low-Power Engineering to talk about the future trends in technology, global business and power. Prior to his current role, which was created by the Korean government in April, he ran the semiconductor business at Samsung, where he spent the last 20 years in top management positions. He also is the... » read more

Why Your iPhone Battery Doesn’t Last


By Jon McDonald The other day a friend asked about the battery life on my iPhone. I love the phone by the way; he was disappointed with how often he had to recharge his. I responded with the one thing I had tried—turn off the Bluetooth. With that one change I have been pretty happy with the time between charges. His question got me thinking about the battery life of the phone, and I start... » read more

The Long And Painful Path To Power Optimization


By Ed Sperling Think about any mobile Internet device today. Batteries typically last all day, applications shut down with ease, and the number of things it can do has reached the point where many people typically carry one device on the road rather than multiple devices they used to lug around several years ago. Perhaps even more astounding is the price drop on these devices. A basic cell ... » read more

Apple’s Re-aggregation Anomaly


Apple’s new iPad is an interesting device not so much because of what it offers to consumers—that’s certainly interesting in its own right—but because of how Apple built the device and why. Apple has been scouring the market for seasoned semiconductor engineers of late. The process started two years ago when the company hired a team of former engineers from the late Digital Equipme... » read more

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