Racing To Design Chips Faster


A shift is underway to develop chips for more narrowly defined market segments, and in much smaller production runs. Rather than focusing on shrinking features and reducing cost per transistor by the billions of units, the emphasis behind this shift is less about scale and much more about optimization for specific markets and delivering those solutions more quickly. As automotive, consumer e... » read more

Are Chips Getting More Reliable?


Reliability is emerging as a key metric in the semiconductor industry, alongside of power, performance and cost, but it also is becoming harder to measure and increasingly difficult to achieve. Most large semiconductor companies look at reliability in connection with consumer devices that last several years before they are replaced, but a big push into automotive, medical and industrial elec... » read more

Developing Effective Design Strategies for Today’s Wearable Devices: Power Management


As the next wave of wearable devices expands into a new class of revolutionary and innovative products, there will be a growing importance placed on the real-time operating system (RTOS) and corresponding middleware. Wearable System-on-Chip (SoC) processors require an operating system optimized for size and performance with power-efficient wireless connectivity options needed for machine-to-mac... » read more

Anything As A Service


Everything as a service promises to simplify our lives, from cutting edge business to consumer applications. It is too early to tell, but the concept of everything moving to the cloud poses some interesting issues, from bandwidth to security. Who would have guessed that in 2015, launching a business would require virtually no physical assets? You simply turn on your computer and everything y... » read more

Innovating Virtualization In Emulation


Last week we officially introduced our next-generation emulator. We used the words “datacenter” and “virtualization” a lot, and it is worthwhile to underline the significance of what just happened in emulation. The new concepts are just as key to emulation as was the invention of virtual memory and memory management units to processors and software development. The concept of virtual... » read more

The Cloud, The IoE, And You


In part one, the cloud of the future was dissected. This part examines concerns and possible impediments. No one doubts the cloud will be an important part of the Internet of Everything, but the transition from local to off-site computing will never be completely seamless or risk-free. To begin with, there is the cost of storage and bandwidth. Running applications using on-site hardware ... » read more

The Great IoE Race Begins


Nobody knows how many tens of billions of semiconductors will be used in the IoE, but it's a sure bet it won't be a few chips replicated billions of times. Most IoE devices will need to be customized for specific applications. Many will need to be highly reliable for many years. And all of them will need to be secure and power-efficient. Yet they also will need to connect to heterogeneous ne... » read more

Exploring System Architectures For Data-Intensive Applications


The exponential growth of digital data is being driven by a number of factors, including the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) and an increased reliance on complex analytics extracted from extremely large data sets. Perhaps not surprisingly, IDC analysts see digital data doubling roughly every two years. This dramatic growth continues to challenge, and in some cases, even outpace industry cap... » read more

Executive Insight: Lip-Bu Tan


Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of Cadence, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about consolidation, Moore's Law, and where the opportunities are in the IoT and automotive markets. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the big concerns for the semiconductor industry in general, and EDA in particular? Tan: Top on my list is all the consolidation that's goin... » read more

New Metrics For The Cloud


Data centers are beginning to adjust their definition of what makes one server better than another. Rather than comparing benchmarked performance of general-purpose servers, they are adding a new level of granularity based upon what kind of chips work best for certain operations or applications. Those decisions increasingly include everything from the level of redundancy in compute operations, ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →