Memory Choices Grow


Memory is becoming one of the starting points for SoC architectures, evolving from a basic checklist item that was almost always in the shadow of improving processor performance or lowering the overall power budget. In conjunction with that shift, chipmakers must now grapple with many more front-end decisions about placement, memory type and access prioritization. There are plenty of rules ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Predictions Wally Rhines, Mentor Graphics' chairman and CEO, was presented with the Kaufman Award last night for outstanding achievement in electronic design. In his acceptance speech, he plotted the growth of the EDA industry at a consistent 2% of the semiconductor industry for the past couple decades. But he noted that with a shift to system design automation, that number would rise from t... » read more

Ecosystem Vs. Ecosystem


The massive consolidation that has been underway over the past couple years is about to slow down. Interest rates are expected to increase in the very near future—the Fed has been dropping hints about this for months—ending the era of cheap capital. The cost of borrowing already is creeping up in anticipation of this, and it's happening globally because money lending is a global industry. ... » read more

Security Improvements Ahead


After nearly two years of talking about how security is one of the biggest problems facing the IoE, progress is being made on a number of fronts. The changes involve many companies, both individually and collaboratively through standards groups. And while none of this will stop the kind of high-profile breaches that affected Target or Home Depot or JPMorgan Chase or a long list of other gian... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mentor Graphics began selling infrastructure hardware this week, including an end-to-end IoT solution that includes a reference design for a customizable gateway, a cloud backend, and runtime solutions on which to build a wide array of IoT edge devices. Mentor also released virtual platforms for Altera's Arria 10 SoC FPGA, and updated its Valor PCB manufacturing process to focus on Industry 4.0... » read more

Making Cars Smarter


The fuel injection control unit has come a long way since 1983 when Ford Motor Co. first included a 16-bit Intel microcontroller-based fuel injection system in its 4-cylinder Escort. Today, some high end vehicles contain more than 100 microprocessors, which is mind boggling in comparison to that Escort that contained just one. To be sure, the automotive industry is a unique animal. Compared ... » read more

More Choices, Less Certainty


The increasing cost of feature scaling is splintering the chip market, injecting uncertainty into a global supply chain that has been continually fine-tuned for decades. Those with deep enough resources and a clear need for density will likely follow Moore's Law, at least until 7nm. What comes after that will depend on a variety of factors ranging from available lithography—EUV, multi-bea... » read more

Top 5 Reasons The SoC Interconnect Matters


The on-chip interconnect is the one area of SoC design that still does not receive the priority that it deserves. It’s like Rodney Dangerfield: It gets no respect. However, that is changing because of rising chip complexity, smaller process dimensions, and acknowledgement of the fact that in a world where design teams commercially license most of the chip’s critical semiconductor IP (like C... » read more

Will The Chip Work?


As the number of possible issues mount for integrating IP into complex chips, so does the focus on solving these issues. What becomes quickly apparent to anyone integrating multiple IP blocks is that one size doesn't fit all, either from an IP or a tools standpoint. There is no single solution because there is no single way of putting IP together. Each architecture is unique, and each brings... » read more

Can IP Integration Be Automated?


What exactly does it mean to automate [getkc id="43" comment="IP"] integration? Ask four people in the industry and you’ll get four different answers. “The key issue is how you can assemble the hardware as quickly as you can out of pre-made pieces of IP,” said Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of [getentity id="22674" e_name="Arteris"]. To Simon Rance, senior product manager in the ... » read more

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