IoT Brings Low Power To Forefront


Low power has become a primary design consideration over the past decade, driven by consumer portable devices packing in greater amounts of processing power and sophisticated communications, while at the same time providing extended battery life even though developments in battery technology have advanced little in the same timeframe. But the [getkc id="76" comment="Internet of Things"] (IoT) w... » read more

Where Is Gene Roddenberry When You Need Him?


As we chatted the other day, my colleague Scott Lewis said something so deceptively simple that it made us stop in our tracks. “We need another Gene Roddenberry,” he said. The Star Trek creator in the 1960s introduced the world to an array of futuristic technologies (the tricorder, wireless ear sets and so on) that in effect became our collective electronics product roadmap. We have m... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 10


eSilicon’s Mike Gianfagna is searching for patterns and trends in the industry, ranging from big data and the cloud to the IoT. Check out the four V’s. The market for wearables is gaining momentum. Apple made a huge deal out of its Apple Watch this week, but it wasn’t alone. ARM’s David Maidment is on the ground in Berlin looking at the new gear based on Android. Mentor’s John... » read more

Stacked Die Politics, Technology And Tools


The path to stacking die may look fairly straightforward, but reality is somewhat different. There is a battle raging between foundries and OSATs over who will actually stack and package the die. There is new technology being created that could change the economics of how these die go together. And there is debate about just how ready the tools are to make all of this happen. All of this is ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Mentor Graphics unveiled a hypervisor with configuration, debugging and hardware support. The solution is aimed at a variety of vertical markets, ranging from industrial and medical to consumer electronics. NXP uncorked a passive Inter-Integrated Circuit (I²C) solution for near-field communications tagging, allowing appliances, wearables and consumer electronics to use existing NFC-... » read more

IoT Growing Pains


The Internet of Things is having one of those defining moments — and not in a good way. Only a limited number of things will work together at first. Only in rare case will they actually cross boundaries between vertical markets such as consumer or home, automotive and medical. And in no cases will there be any guarantees, at least in the short term, that communications will be reliable, secur... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 3


Ansys’ Bill Vandermark flags the top five engineering technology articles of the week. A couple of these are unusual, such as e-mailing brain waves, and hoverbikes, which could really improve bike safety—as long as you don’t hit a bird. Synopsys’ Marc Greenberg looks at just how fast DDR4 can run. But what do you call it when you overclock everything? Is that still DDR4? Cadence�... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 27


In the spirit of making a positive social contribution, and to recognize employees for their contributions to the local community, Applied Materials’ chairman Mike Splinter accepted the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Nice job, Mike! With development work underway on the 10nm process node, and questions about getting there with conventional lithography, Cadence’s Richard Goering invites us to ... » read more

Fixing Functional Coverage


Constrained random test pattern generation entered the scene a couple of decades ago as a better way to spend time and resources for the creation of stimulus. Stimulus definition had become an arduous task—defining the patterns necessary to exercise designs of increasing size. It was successfully argued that spending time writing models instead of creating stimulus and having a computer p... » read more

Looking For The Next Big Thing


With [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] slowing down or coming to an end, finding the next big thing may be very different than it was in the past. We cannot assume that more of the same will be a winner. The semiconductor industry has been blessed with two new product categories that have catapulted it through what should have been a very difficult period with barely a scratch. Those techno... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →