Executive Insight: Grant Pierce

By Ed Sperling - 27 Jul, 2015 - Comments: 0

Grant Pierce, president and CEO of Sonics, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the effects of industry consolidation, China's impact, and the unfolding security threat with the IoT. What follows are excerpts of that interview. SE: Consolidation is one of the big stories right now. What does that mean for your company and the industry as a whole? Pierce: It's a very inter... » read more

Technology Tsunami Approaches

By Brian Bailey - 27 Jul, 2015 - Comments: 0

How many times have we heard the saying that technology advancements are accelerating and that inevitably the older generation will have increasing problems keeping up with the new advancements? This happened to me with software development methodologies over fifteen years ago. I still program, when people actually let me, using basically the same techniques I learned when I was in my teens.... » read more

The Interconnect Bottleneck

By Ann Mutschler - 28 May, 2015 - Comments: 0

With communications playing a crucial role in the design and performance of multi-core SoCs, various interconnect structures have been proposed as promising solutions to simplify and optimize SoC design. However, sometimes things don’t go as planned and the interconnect becomes the bottleneck. “Under high utilization cases the DRAM will be over-constrained with requests from all the a... » read more

With Responsibility Comes Power

By Brian Bailey - 12 Feb, 2015 - Comments: 0

The debate continues as to whether [getkc id="106" kc_name="power"] has risen to become a primary design consideration, or if it remains secondary to functionality and performance. What is indisputable is the rise in the importance of both power and energy conservation. As technology improves, additional aspects of the design flow are being affected. With that, the focus for power reduction is ... » read more

Designing the Right Architecture

By Synopsys - 14 Jan, 2015 - Comments: 0

Designing the right architecture of a multi-processor SoC for today's sophisticated electronic products is a challenging task. The most critical element for meeting the performance requirements of the entire system is the interconnect and memory architecture. These SoC infrastructure IP components are highly configurable and need to be customized to the communication needs of all the other modu... » read more

Architecture Versus Silicon

By Ann Mutschler - 09 Oct, 2014 - Comments: 0

For many, if not most designs today, power is everything. Determining where power is being lost is critical to making sure the design is optimized. So where to begin? To this end, it is useful to go back to the fundamentals of what power is and what power consumption is, noted Paul Traynar, software architect at [getentity id="22021" comment="ANSYS/Apache"]. “Power is proportional to capac... » read more

Executive Insight: Satish Bagalkotkar

By Ed Sperling - 23 Jul, 2014 - Comments: 1

Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Satish Bagalkotkar, president and CEO of design services company Synapse Design to talk about massive shifts in the semiconductor industry and his vision of how these changes will alter the landscape, from chipmakers to design services to what gets built and how it will get used. What follows are excerpts of that interview. SE: What worries you most? ... » read more

Tech Talk: 2.5D Stacked Die

By Ed Sperling - 20 Nov, 2013 - Comments: 0

What's the motivation for moving to 2.5D packaging and architectures rather than following Moore's Law? Shafy Eltoukhy, VP of operations and technology development at Open-Silicon, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about adding another dimension in semiconductors. [youtube vid=HwpY9bUNt0w] » read more

HotChips: Power8

By Barry Pangrle - 12 Sep, 2013 - Comments: 2

It’s another year, another HotChips Conference and another update on IBM’s POWER processor. IBM continues to impress with its big iron processor, and this year it’s the new POWER8. IBM announced more details of its new POWER8 processor at HotChips and IBM now joins Intel at 22nm, but with the twist that IBM’s process is based on SOI technology. The POWER8 quadruples the thread count ... » read more

Mixing Custom And Standard Parts

By Ed Sperling - 08 Aug, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The amount of third-party and re-used IP content in an SoC is on the rise, but once a decision to buy vs. make has been made it doesn’t always stay that way. In fact, chipmakers are swinging the pendulum back and forth across a variety of chips, building IP themselves, standardizing on another vendor’s IP, then sometimes rolling it back the other way. The reasons are usua... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
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