Balancing Power And Test


The International Test Conference will be held at the Disneyland resort hotel in Anaheim, Calif., from Nov. 4-9. One of the biggest concerns for the test engineering community is to account for the impact on test quality due to additional power management techniques implemented in deep submicron designs. Elaborate power management strategies, such as voltage scaling, clock gating or power-ga... » read more

Experts at the Table: Black Belt Power Management


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss rising integration challenges caused by an increasing amount of black-box IP with Qi Wang, technical marketing group director, solutions marketing, for the low-power and mixed-signal group at Cadence; J. Bhasker, architect at eSilicon Corp.; Navraj Nandra, senior director of product marketing for analog an... » read more

Where Does It Hurt?


By Ed Sperling The IC design industry is feeling a new kind of pain—this one driven by uncertainty over architectural shifts, new ecosystem interactions and new ways to account for costs. As mainstream ICs move from 50/45/40nm to around 32/28/22nm, there are only two choices for design teams—continue shrinking features or stack dies. In many cases, the ultimate solution may be a combina... » read more

The Double Whammy


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Given that at 40nm and below every [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"] has some mixed-signal content, combined with the fact that power awareness is top priority no matter what the target application is, design teams and verification engineers are grappling with tremendous challenges just to get a chip to yield. “For verification engineers and for designers, this is a ... » read more

Tales From The Road


By Mike Gianfagna We recently held a SpyGlass Power “boot camp” at Atrenta San Jose. We brought in 15 of our best and brightest field AEs from all over the world and discussed the very latest techniques for advanced power optimization. When you get a group of folks like this together in one room, the learning typically goes both ways. The “students” (the FAEs) certainly learn a lot ... » read more

Techniques For FSM Design And Verification


Large system-on-chip (SoC) designs contain many finite state machines (FSMs) that interact with data paths, memories, and other components. Although FSMs are critical building blocks many designers lack an understanding of their role and impact on design quality and validation effort. FSMs are a source of functional bugs in SoCs. They can cause poor timing, power, and performance. Although v... » read more

Experts At The Table: Coherency


System-Level Design sat down to discuss coherency with Mirit Fromovich, principal solutions engineer at Cadence; Drew Wingard, CTO of Sonics; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atrenta, and Marcello Coppola, technical director at STMicroelectronics. What follow are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: We’ve been hearing a lot about Wide I/O. Why is it so important and what effec... » read more

Experts At The Table: Coherency


System-Level Design sat down to discuss coherency with Mirit Fromovich, principal solutions engineer at Cadence; Drew Wingard, CTO of Sonics; Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at Atrenta, and Marcello Coppola, technical director at STMicroelectronics. What follow are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: We’ve been hearing a lot about Wide I/O. Why is it so important and what effec... » read more

The Rise Of The Power Architect


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Call them power czars, power gurus or power architects, this role within design teams is gaining importance with the need to understand, manage and control the power budget throughout the entire design process. As such, power architects are in high demand today with power architecture teams doubling in size within a year or two. Driving the need for this highly s... » read more

The Easy Stuff Is Over


By Ed Sperling Doomsayers have been predicting the end of Moore’s Law for the better part of a decade. While it appears that it will still remain viable for some companies—Intel and IBM already are looking into single digits of nanometers and researchers speculating about picometer designs—for most companies the race is over. Progress will still be made in moving SoCs from one node to... » read more

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