Derivative ICs: A Look At The Options

By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the cost of designing and producing even moderately advanced SoCs skyrocketing, semiconductor companies and systems houses must find ways to defray the cost across a larger number of end uses than ever. As such many companies have adopted a platform-based derivative design approach, with that the platform serving as the first SoC design of a new family. That s... » read more

Different Tradeoffs

By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The push to “smaller, faster and cheaper” hasn’t changed since ICs were first introduced, but the context for those requirements is beginning to shift—with enormous consequences. What was once done on multiple chips continue to migrate to a single chip or package because of cost, but in some cases the decisions about goes where go well beyond an individual device to i... » read more

Interchip Connectivity

By Kurt Shuler - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Kurt Shuler It may seem strange to link two interchip interface standards to the future of3D integrated circuits, but please bear with me for a few minutes. I hope to prove that the learning from today will impact how we design SoCs in the near future. C2C and LLI: The first standards created with the “combo chip” in mind As you may already know, the purposes of the chip-to-chip (C2... » read more

Are Hardware Developers From Mars And Software Developers From Jupiter?

By Frank Schirrmeister - 21 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Frank Schirrmeister In a recent discussion fellow Blogger Kurt Shuler, when talking about hardware and software designers, said something along the lines “Given languages like Verilog, both hardware and software developers really do software, for hardware designers the software is just getting fixed much sooner.” I intuitively agreed with him, but his comment inspired this post in which... » read more

Ambient Computing: Interdependencies Rule

By Ed Sperling - 26 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Ambient computing: Just the concept conjures up images of a Star Trek-like ‘Computer’ that is ever at the ready, awaiting a query at any moment, and which can discern as well as perform significant tasks. While Apple’s Siri gets there partway, it is significant because the concepts that make the technology possible behind the scenes draw upon a multidisciplinary... » read more

Semiconductor Slowdown? Invest!

By Kurt Shuler - 26 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Kurt Shuler Samsung’s announcement that it is investing a company-record $42B in 2012 for technology development came as a bit of a shock to many in the financial and technology press. The size of this investment dwarfs that of any other company I know of, and even exceeds the expected technology investments of entire nations, such as the combined investments of the Japanese semiconductor... » read more

Where The Wild Things Are…

By Kurt Shuler - 15 Dec, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Kurt Shuler After spending the past month on the road meeting customers in China, Korea and Europe, I finally had the opportunity to read Maurice Sendak’s excellent children’s book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” to my two year-old son this weekend. I see some parallels between the world experienced by the book’s young protagonist, Max, and what I learned from Gartner analyst Ganesh... » read more

Build It Faster

By Ed Sperling - 17 Nov, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Hitting market windows with IC designs has always been a struggle, but the race to the finish line is becoming more critical—and much more difficult. The reason: Market windows themselves are shrinking. Products that used to stick around for years may now only last for months, replaced by newer versions that offer either better performance or lower power. In many cases, par... » read more

Thinking Bigger

By Kurt Shuler - 17 Nov, 2011 - Comments: 0

I am in Shanghai and Xi’an this week for the ICCAD event and numerous customer visits, and have had the opportunity to observe and reflect upon the drivers of change within our industry. Living in the United States, and specifically Silicon Valley, has given me a front-row seat to the technology business for well over a decade. But my first visit to mainland China has shown me how parochial a... » read more

Derivative Designs Demand Discipline

By Ed Sperling - 20 Oct, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler By and large most designs today are derivatives, meaning they don’t start from a blank slate. And while that gives engineering teams a starting point, it also can make adding new IP blocks or changes to the design problematic, with the potential for increased routing and timing issues along with considerable pain to back-end engineers and delays in chip schedules. ... » read more

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