Blog Review: Oct. 3


Applied's Buvna Ayyagari-Sangamalli notes that the requirements of AI are challenging the entire design ecosystem, and while new materials are necessary, so is keeping up the current pace of architecture and EDA development. Mentor's Joe Hupcey III digs into how to handle counters effectively with formal by reducing their size or replacing them with abstract models to allow formal engines to... » read more

RISC-V Inches Toward The Center


RISC-V is pushing further into the mainstream, showing up across a wide swath of designs and garnering support from a long and still-growing list of chipmakers, tools vendors, universities and foundries. In most cases it is being used as a complementary processor than a replacement for something else, but that could change in the future. What makes RISC-V particularly attractive to chipmaker... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things IBM this week launched the Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture, which combines artificial intelligence, Internet of Things technology, and cloud-based offerings, providing insights to farmers through a managed service. Among other features, growers can deploy drones to send photos to the IBM Cloud for AI-based trend analysis and detection of crop diseases. The platform ... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm announced a new processor targeted at autonomous driving applications. The Cortex-A76AE is a superscalar, out-of-order processor that incorporates Split-Lock safety technology. Split-Lock allows CPU clusters in an a SoC to be configured either in ‘split mode’ for high performance, allowing two (or four) independent CPUs in the cluster to be used for diverse tasks and applications, or �... » read more

What Will Intel Do Next?


The writing is on the wall for big processor makers. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google are developing their own processors. In addition, there are more than 30 startups developing various types of AI accelerators, as well as a field of embedded FPGA vendors, a couple of discrete FPGA makers, and a slew of soft processor cores. This certainly hasn't been lost on Intel. As the world's largest... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 26


VLSI Research's Dan Hutcheson chats with GlobalFoundries CEO Tom Caulfield about the company's changing strategy, how the company got to its present point, and how many companies will be using leading edge technologies. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks for what's changed (or not) for the state of software security and breach disclosure regulations in the year since the massive Equifax data b... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Release 3 is published by oneM2M, the worldwide Internet of Things interoperability standards initiative. The third set of specifications deals with 3GPP interworking, especially as it relates to cellular IoT connectivity, among other features. The release is said to enable seamless interworking with narrowband IoT and LTE-M connectivity through the 3GPP Service Capability E... » read more

A New Type Of Switch


Back in July, Applied Materials announced that we’d been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop technology for AI. While Applied is engaged on the development of many disruptive technologies, it’s not often that we’re in a position to discuss them in early development. Thanks to the vision of DARPA’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative and their ... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 19


Applied Materials' David Thompson shares the new DARPA program that is focused on using correlated electrons to develop a new type of switch with quantum effects, potentially leading to unprecedented switching speeds. Mentor's Joe Hupcey III argues that for the most effective formal analysis, assertions should be as simple as possible and shares some tips on decomposing big assertions. Ca... » read more

The Security Penalty


It's not clear if Meltdown, Spectre and Foreshadow caused actual security breaches, but they did prompt big processor vendors like Intel, Arm, AMD and IBM to fix these vulnerabilities before they were made public by Google's Project Zero. While all of this may make data center managers and consumers feel better in one respect, it has created a level of panic of a different sort. For decades,... » read more

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