Near-Threshold Computing


The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought a lot of attention to the need for extremely low-power design, and this in turn has increased the pressure for voltage reduction. In the past, each new process node shrunk the feature size and lowered the nominal operating voltage. This resulted in a drop in power consumption. However, the situation changed at about 90nm in two ways. ... » read more

How Do We Get To Full Throttle In Mobile?


By Govind Wathan and Brian Fuller With each new generation of mobile device, we look forward to running the latest apps—especially games. (It's amazing how immersive mobile games have become in just a few years). We’re consumers but we’re also engineers, and here we’re faced with a huge challenge. It’s not just the games that get more powerful. A whole new generation of virtual ... » read more

Blog Review: June 15


Synopsys' Marc Greenberg shares a somber and personal story on the need to get ADAS to as many drivers as possible. From the Linley IoT conference, Cadence's Paul McLellan features a talk on protecting edge nodes and the three big steps towards IoT security. Mentor's Avidan Efody presents a lighthearted reminder on the basics of ISO 26262 terminology. Just how much security is enough? ... » read more

Plotting The Next Semiconductor Road Map


The semiconductor industry is retrenching around new technologies and markets as Moore's Law becomes harder to sustain and growth rates in smart phones continue to flatten. In the past, it was a sure bet that pushing to the next process node would provide improvements in power, performance and cost. But after 22nm, the economics change due to the need for multi-patterning and finFETs, and th... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Design Automation Conference ARM Holdings announced that its DesignStart initiative to enable easy creation of chip designs using ARM Cortex-M0 intellectual property now takes in electronic design automation tools and design environments offered by Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics. “Simplifying access to EDA tools from Cadence and Mentor Graphics will further spur rapid innovation,... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Mergers & Acquisitions Silvaco jumped into the IP market with its acquisition of commercialization and management company IPextreme. Founder and CEO Warren Savage will be staying on to head up the new division. Additionally, through wholly owned French subsidiary Infiniscale SA, Silvaco acquired a majority stake in edXact, which focused on parasitic reduction tools. Rambus acquired th... » read more

DAC Day Four: Excitement And Risk


One thing that was new to DAC this year, was an art exhibit. These were pieces of artwork related to our industry, such as chip plots, or more abstract ideas based on design data or analyses. They received many more entrants than their wildest dreams and had to choose a winner from over 80 pieces, but the grand prize was won by a 3D model of a finFET by David Freid of Coventor. This piece was ... » read more

Executive Insight: Simon Segars


Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, examines the future of mobile computing, how it intersects with the IoT, why ecosystems are vital, and how computing is evolving. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Most analysts say the growth rate of mobile is slowing. The big buzz phrase now is Internet of Things. How does ARM's role change with that shift? Segars: Mobile is still changing and... » read more

Blog Review: June 8


Cadence's Paul McLellan presents Luc van den Hove's keynote at the imec Technology Forum, where he discusses the future of scaling beyond Moore's Law, from going 3D to envisioning new architectures Two years after Heartbleed's disclosure, Synopsys' Robert Vamosi chats with Billy Rios of embedded security company WhiteScope on the continued significance of the OpenSSL vulnerability in a new p... » read more

Alternative To x86, ARM Architectures?


Software developed by professors and graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley? That will never fly in the semiconductor industry, right? Maybe they said that about SPICE, four decades ago. The jury is still out on RISC-V (pronounced risk-five) the modular, open-source instruction set architecture created in this decade by Cal professors and students, yet the ISA is gai... » read more

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