Spoiled By Moore’s Law


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Over the past 20 years, lithium ion has emerged as the predominant battery technology. While there are a few variants, it seems that for everything from smartphones to automobiles, the same basic technology is being used. Many other technologies that have come and gone over the years—nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride come to mind in the recent past, but they ar... » read more

More Art Than Science


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Not so long ago, high-end digital devices were mostly just digital. Today large SoCs contain a significant amount of analog/mixed-signal content. And given that analog circuits have certain sensitivities different from digital blocks, there is a desire to convert some of those analog signals to digital to achieve power savings and take advantage of digital verificat... » read more

The Growing Integration Challenge


By Ed Sperling As the number of processors and the amount of memory and IP on a chip continues to skyrocket, so does the challenge for integrating all of this stuff on a single die—or even multiple dies in the same package. There are a number of reasons why it’s getting more difficult to make all of these IP blocks work together. First of all, nothing ever stands still in design. As a r... » read more

Power Impacts On Advanced Node IP


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the move to the 28nm or 20nm process nodes, SoC engineering teams are seeing a significant amount of variations due to manufacturability. To reflect how a design element will be printed on the wafer, foundries offer many libraries with multiple corners for different voltages, timing and temperature, among other things. “At 28nm what we are seeing is a l... » read more

CPF 2.0 Voltage Regulator And Analog Ports


By Luke Lang CPF 2.0 was released more than a year and half ago, yet the majority of the designs are still done with CPF 1.1. This is one of those good news/bad news situations. The good news is that CPF 1.1 is perfectly adequate for majority of the LP designs. The bad news is that designers may not be aware of the new CPF 2.0 features that could be quite useful. This month, we will take a loo... » read more

Roundtable: Lower-Power Chips


Low Power-High Performance Engineering talks about problems in low-power design with Richard Trihy of GlobalFoundries, Leah Clark of Broadcom, Qi Wang of Cadence and Venki Venkatesh of Atrenta. [youtube vid=cD560pgEegk] » read more

Experts At The Table: Obstacles In Low-Power Design


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power design with with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Richard Trihy, director of design enablement at GlobalFoundries; Venki Venkatesh, engineering director at Atrenta; and Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: What are ... » read more

The Essential Tool Kit


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Is there an essential chip design tool kit today that has only the ‘must haves?’ Sure, this sounds like a straightforward question, but the answer really depends on what process node the design will be manufacturing on. According to Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer for the design and creation business at Mentor Graphics, there’s actually nothi... » read more

The New Mixed-Signal Flow


By Ann Steffora Mutschler We are on the cusp of the mixed-signal era. Traditional mixed-signal design environments, in which analog and digital parts are implemented separately, no longer are sufficient. They lead to excess iteration and prolonged design cycle time. Today’s mixed-signal designs require a new approach that enables design teams to be as efficient as possible productivity... » read more

The Growing Confidence Gap In Verification


By Ed Sperling It’s no surprise that verification is getting more difficult at each new process node. What’s less obvious is just how deep into organizations the job of verifying SoCs and ASICs now extends. Functional verification used to be a well-defined job at the back end of the design flow. It has evolved into a multi-dimensional, multi-group challenge, beginning at the earliest st... » read more

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