Diverging Viewpoints

By Ed Sperling - 28 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The raw materials of semiconductor design include smart, well-trained people and money to fund good ideas from those people, whose backgrounds typically come from engineering, math, physics, computer science, materials science and sometimes even chemistry. While many experts, executives, and industry groups have been sounding the alarm in recent years about everything from la... » read more

The Evolving Interconnect

By Ann Mutschler - 28 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Chip interconnect protocol requirements are evolving as designs move to 20nm and below process geometries, and not always in predictable ways. At least part of this is being driven by what an SoC is used for. The continued push to shrink features opens up real estate at each new process node. For the past decade, that real estate has been used to add more featu... » read more

The Smartphonification Of Things

By Ann Mutschler - 28 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler The term, ‘Internet of Things,’ was first coined more than a decade ago by technology visionary Kevin Ashton but has slowly trickled down to the world of chip design and is now mentioned constantly in conversation. The reason is simple: System-level design tools are getting sophisticated enough to handle the intricacies required by devices in an Internet of ... » read more

Staying Neutral

By Kurt Shuler - 28 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Kurt Shuler It’s official: The great IP land grab has begun. The process actually has been taking place gradually, but has accelerated with Imagination Technologies’ acquisition of MIPS last year and, most recently, Cadence’s acquisition of Tensilica. For makers of semiconductors, four competing IP behemoths are emerging after years of fragmentation within the semiconductor IP indu... » read more

Version Control

By Ed Sperling - 14 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling & Ann Steffora Mutschler One of the biggest impediments to progress in semiconductor design is progress itself—version after version of specifications, formats and increasingly IP. In fact, there are so many different versions, some of which conflict directly with each other, that it may take months or even years before some customers adopt new products. Much has ... » read more

Smarter Things

By Ed Sperling - 28 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling SoC design has largely been a race to the next process node in accordance with Moore’s Law, but it’s about to take a sharp turn away from that as the Internet of Things becomes more ubiquitous. There has been much made about the Internet of Things over the past couple of years—home networks that involve smart refrigerators sending reminders to consumers that the milk is... » read more

The Rise Of Layout-Dependent Effects

By Ann Mutschler - 28 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Designing for today’s advanced semiconductor manufacturing process nodes brings area, speed, power and other benefits but also new performance challenges as a result of the pure physics of running current through tiny wires. Layout-dependent effects (LDE), which emerged at 40nm and are having a larger impact at 28 and 20nm, introduce variability to circuit ... » read more

Advanced SoC Interconnect IP

By Kurt Shuler - 28 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Kurt Shuler I am thoroughly enjoying 2013. That’s because there seems to be a lot more reason for optimism this year than last year. But before we let go of 2012, it’s important to reflect on the past year and see what it can teach us so we can make better business decisions moving forward. The one lesson learned is that flexibility for SoC designs is increasingly more important. In ... » read more

Chip Economics

By Various Writers - 28 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

The concise research paper, "NoC Interconnect Improves SoC Economics: Initial Investment is Low Compared to SoC Performance and Cost Benefits," by Objective Analysis Semiconductor Market Research, provides quantitative data from user experiences comparing the costs and benefits of implementing network on chip SoC interconnects versus traditional bus and crossbar interconnects. You will learn... » read more

Changes In The Supply Chain

By Ed Sperling - 31 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

Runaway complexity in design, implementation, verification and manufacturing is being mirrored across an increasingly complex supply chain. Now the question is what to do about it. Complexity is being driven by the continued shrinking of feature sizes and the clamor for more functionality to leverage the real estate that becomes available with each new process node. But the increased density... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

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