Tech Talk: Cloud Power


PMC distinguished engineer Kenneth Wagner talks about the need for conserving energy in the data center as well as mobile device, and what are the best ways to accomplish that. The video was shot at the Cadence Low Power Summit. [youtube vid=tXx8-qX4vm4] » read more

Short-Range, Low-Power Sensors


Over the last 10 years the world has done a remarkably good job of connecting the global wireless world. This is partly because of visionaries, partly because of marketers, and partly just because we can, but mostly because of convenience. We now never need be to be off the wide-area interconnected highway. The last decade has radically changed the way we live. The smartphone and its cousin, th... » read more

Money, Hackers And Lawyers


When magnetic tape backup was introduced in the early 1950s, it was stored in vaults. Access was slow. Someone actually had to go get the tape, load it onto a mainframe computer, and start the spool rolling. But at least you could be sure that, minus a well-planned break-in or cloak-and-dagger theft, it would remain private. The latest push into cloud-based storage has altered the risk equat... » read more

Chip Manufacturing Data Now Requires Cloud Techniques


The parameters in semiconductor manufacturing are growing so large that an analysis method similar to what’s currently used for big data is now required. The good news is that big data analysis techniques, which process a vast amount of data such as search data and communication logs in the cloud, is entirely applicable to the data of semiconductor process. Photo 1: Opening view of AEC... » read more

EDA’s Cloudy Vision


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Since the dawn of EDA, the industry has largely operated under a traditional software distribution model whereby the customer would run the software it licensed on its own hardware equipment. With the sophistication of advanced IT management techniques as well as education surrounding “The Cloud,” it may be safe to predict that engineers in the not-to-distant futu... » read more

The Other Green


The human memory is rather short when it comes to certain things. Energy efficiency is one of them. While they may cringe at paying $4 a gallon for gasoline to fill of their car, they were convinced that drastic measures were necessary when gas hit $1 a gallon. And while consumers collectively account for the vast percentage of energy consumed, individually they don’t consume enough to mak... » read more

EDA Forecast: More Clouds


By Ed Sperling Design engineers and EDA vendors used to scoff at the idea of cloud-based tools, but no one is scoffing anymore. A decade after the idea of renting tools online fell flat, largely due to security concerns by chipmakers, all three of the major EDA players and some smaller rivals are taking cloud-based solutions very seriously again. There are several reasons for this change... » read more

Cloud Seeding


Selling EDA through a software-as-a-service model is hardly a new concept. It’s also not a particularly successful one. Despite some initial hype and sporadic attempts to revive it, the idea has fallen flat due to concerns about version control, security and an almost universal aversion to engineers having to send large files back and forth to a server. The approach is getting a new look, ... » read more

Greener Data Centers


By Ed Sperling For decades the race inside the data center was all about performance. If you upgraded from an IBM Series/370 mainframe to a Series/380 your applications ran faster. And if you upgraded your PC server from a Pentium II to a Pentium 4 you got significantly better performance. The race now is to reduce the number of servers altogether, to lower the cooling costs per server ra... » read more

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