Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Analog Devices acquired the wireless assets of Comcores. Analog Devices plans to continue to evolve the wireless technology and participate in the O-RAN forum. Teams based in Denmark and Poland, including Comcores founder and former CEO, Thomas Noergaard, will join ADI. Comcores will retain its other lines of intellectual property and digital systems business, Chip-to-Chip and Ethernet Systems ... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Aerospace The NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover, which landed safely on Mars this week, has some new autonomous systems. The landing craft flew autonomously to find a good landing spot. When on the ground, the rover can drive in an autonomous traverse mode. Also autonomous is the small helicopter, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, being tested on Mars. The helicopter can fly up to 90 seconds autonom... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Renesas Electronics Corporation will acquire Dialog Semiconductor in an all-cash deal worth about US $5.9 billion. Dialog is a supplier of mixed-signal ICs targeting IoT, consumer, automotive, and industrial. The company's primary areas of focus were communications and power control. These products are complementary to existing Renesas embedded compute products. Dialog CEO Dr. Jalal Bagherli... » read more

The Problem With Benchmarks


Benchmarks long have been used to compare products, but what makes a good benchmark and who should be trusted with their creation? The answer to those questions is more difficult than it may appear on the surface, and some benchmarks are being used in surprising ways. Everyone loves a simple, clear benchmark, but that is only possible when the selection criteria are equally simple. Unfortuna... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP Synopsys is joining Microsoft in the U.S. Department of Defense's Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP) program to support the development of IC hardware and workflow prototypes that incorporate Synopsys' assured design and manufacturing flows into Microsoft Azure. The RAMP program aims to bring commercial capabilities and speed to the development of semiconductors fo... » read more

Longer Chip Lifecycles Increase Security Threat


The longer chips and electronic systems remain in use, the more they will need to be refreshed with software and firmware updates. That creates a whole new level of security risks, ranging from over-the-air intercepts to compromised supply chains. These problems have been escalating as more devices are connected to the Internet and to each other, but it's particularly worrisome when it invol... » read more

Edge-Inference Architectures Proliferate


First part of two parts. The second part will dive into basic architectural characteristics. The last year has seen a vast array of announcements of new machine-learning (ML) architectures for edge inference. Unburdened by the need to support training, but tasked with low latency, the devices exhibit extremely varied approaches to ML inference. “Architecture is changing both in the comp... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


The CXL Consortium published the Compute Express Link 2.0 specification. CXL is an interconnect that maintains memory coherency between the CPU memory space and memory on attached devices. CXL 2.0 adds support for switching for fan-out to connect to more devices, memory pooling for increased memory utilization efficiency and providing memory capacity on demand, and support for persistent memory... » read more

Hidden Costs In Faster, Low-Power AI Systems


Chipmakers are building orders of magnitude better performance and energy efficiency into smart devices, but to achieve those goals they also are making tradeoffs that will have far-reaching, long-lasting, and in some cases unknown impacts. Much of this activity is a direct result of pushing intelligence out to the edge, where it is needed to process, sort, and manage massive increases in da... » read more

Von Neumann Is Struggling


In an era dominated by machine learning, the von Neumann architecture is struggling to stay relevant. The world has changed from being control-centric to one that is data-centric, pushing processor architectures to evolve. Venture money is flooding into domain-specific architectures (DSA), but traditional processors also are evolving. For many markets, they continue to provide an effective s... » read more

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