The Week In Review: Manufacturing


In what was called a defensive measure by some, Intel has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Altera for $54 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $16.7 billion. Here’s what one analyst said about the deal. “We continue to believe Intel’s pursuit of Altera–at a significant premium–was based on a defensive position, rather than the purely accretive str... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Cadence unveiled Genus, their next-generation RTL synthesis and physical synthesis engine incorporating a multi-level massively parallel architecture and physically aware context-generation capability. Using it for their recent PowerVR GE7800 GPU, Imagination reported a 5X improvement in turnaround time versus the previous Cadence synthesis solution with no impact on power, performance... » read more

Security Risk Escalating In 2015


Never has there been a more committed effort for malevolent entities to try to leak data, damage infrastructures, and wreak havoc on data essential to our lives. And never has there been a more opportunistic time for the security industry to put their best effort forward and answer the malfeasance challenge. So what is the current state of cyber security? "Unfortunately, there isn’t a l... » read more

What’s Really Inside?


Is it just paranoia, or do devices ranging from industrial controls to military hardware really contain malicious code, Trojan Horses, and remotely triggered back doors? The answer is "maybe not" if you're an optimist, and "maybe" if you're a pessimist, but no one really knows for sure. And that's what really worries security experts, particularly as more devices are connected to other devices.... » read more

Blog Review: June 3


An emergency torch that lets you breathe while escaping a smoke-filled building; a car that shrinks to fit into parking spaces that aren't quite big enough: from extreme situations to everyday activities, Ansys' Justin Nescott features devices designed to make life easier and safer in his picks for week’s top five engineering articles. Check out the prosthetic foot that takes commands from se... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mergers & Acquisitions Synopsys' list of security acquisitions grew with a definitive agreement to buy certain assets of Quotium, including the interactive application security testing product Seeker and its R&D team. The acquisition builds on static analysis technology from Coverity and Codenomicon's fuzz testing and software vulnerability assessment tools. Terms of the deal have no... » read more

M&A Season Now Officially Open


A year ago many people were making jokes quite openly about the IoT. It wasn't uncommon to hear quips about the Internet of Nothing, the Internet of Disconnected Things, the Internet of Cars, or some other variant that questioned just how connected everything would become. The tenor of the conversation has changed significantly in the past year. The jokes are fewer, the stakes are higher. An... » read more

What’s Different At 16/14nm?


Will finFETs live up to their promise? It depends on whom you ask, when you ask that question, and the intended application of a design. But across the semiconductor industry, there is general agreement that it's getting easier to work at the most advanced nodes as tools and flows are better understood and overall experience increases. There is no question that [getkc id="185" kc_name="finFE... » read more

The Interconnect Bottleneck


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

Blog Review: May 27


With the launch of UNICEF and ARM's 'Wearables for Good' design challenge, David Maidment digs into the program's details and how unobtrusive wearables and sensor technology benefits not only consumers in affluent countries, but could improve conditions for those in the developing world as well. From an ultracompact beamsplitter that could boost processing power for supercomputers within the... » read more

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