Blog Review: Mar. 20


Cadence's Paul McLellan argues that rapid improvements in the performance of general-purpose computing led to a lack of innovation in domain-specific architectures, but as scaling slows, they're entering a new golden age. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls takes a look at the use of floating point in an embedded application and some of the pitfalls associated with it. Synopsys' Taylor Armer... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Apple purchased a portfolio of eight granted and pending patents that belonged to Lighthouse AI, a smart home security camera startup that ceased operations near the end of 2018. The portfolio was acquired at about the same time, according to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; financial terms weren’t revealed. Also not disclosed, as usual, is what Apple will do with t... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


M&A Nvidia will acquire Mellanox for $6.9 billion in cash, the largest deal in the chipmaker's history. Traditionally a PC GPU company, Nvidia has made a push into high-performance computing, particularly for AI workloads. Founded in 1999, Israel-based Mellanox focuses on end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. According to Nvidia, Me... » read more

Memory Tradeoffs Intensify in AI, Automotive Applications


The push to do more processing at the edge is putting a strain on memory design, use models and configurations, leading to some complex tradeoffs in designs across a variety of markets. The problem is these architectures are evolving alongside these new markets, and it isn't always clear how data will move across these chips, between devices, and between systems. Chip architectures are becom... » read more

Using Analog For AI


If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and the compute platforms for them may be overlooking an alternative technology—analog. The semiconductor industry has a firm understanding of digital electronics and has been very successful making it scale. It is predictable, has good yield, and while every de... » read more

Isambard Analysis of HPC-Optimized Arm Processors


Written by Simon McIntosh‐Smith, James Price, Tom Deakin, Andrei Poenaru (all from the High Performance Computing Research Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK) In this paper, we present performance results from Isambard, the first production supercomputer to be based on Arm CPUs that have been optimized specifically for HPC. Isambard is the first Cray ... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 13


Mentor's Tom Fitzpatrick questions whether deep learning approaches can really help improve coverage in modern, complex designs. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in at MWC as Huawei chairman Guo Ping defends the company's security practices and shows where its heading in 5G. Synopsys' Eric Huang checks out the newly announced USB4 specification, changes to previous USB names, and a few things ... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Dialog Semiconductor is shifting its product portfolio away from smartphones following its pending $600 million deal with Apple. The chip company is looking toward connected-health products and video-game consoles for future growth. The connected-health devices, developed in collaboration with pharmaceutical firms, would monitor blood pressure and check glucose levels, accor... » read more

Next Wave Of Security For IIoT


A rush of new products and services promise to make the famously un-secured Industrial IoT (IIoT) substantially more secure in the near future. Although the semiconductor industry has been churning out a variety of security-related products and concepts, ranging from root of trust approaches to crypto processors and physically unclonable functions, most IIoT operations have been slow to adop... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 6


Synopsys' Snigdha Dua traces the evolution of memory from SDRAM to DDR5 and the techniques that provide each generation's speed increase. Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into the challenges of 112Gbps SerDes, including what makes PAM4 signaling different from NRZ and what goes into equalization and modeling. Mentor's Rich Edelman provides a quick tutorial on how to set up a custom UVM report... » read more

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