And The Winner Is…


Finding out what resonates with our readers is important, so each year I look back through the list of the best-read articles for the channels that I write for. While this simple strategy does favor articles published during the early part of the year, the fact that our readership continues to grow, partially offsets this bias. For example, in Low Power/High Performance (LPHP) a quarter of the ... » read more

Will Fab Tool Boom Cycle Last?


Fab equipment spending is on pace for a record year in 2017, and it now appears that momentum could continue into 2018. Fab tool vendors found themselves in the midst of an unexpected boom cycle in 2017, thanks to enormous demand for equipment in [getkc id="208" comment="3D NAND"] and, to a lesser degree, [getkc id="93" kc_name="DRAM"]. In the logic/foundry business, however, equipment deman... » read more

Don’t Let FPGA Compiles Be a Bottleneck


Wireless engineers often want to use over-the-air signals to go from concept to prototype. Software defined radios (SDRs) such as the USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) device provide a flexible solution to meet that need. With today’s applications demanding higher bandwidths and lower latencies, more of this signal processing needs to be implemented on the FPGAs of SDRs. However, wir... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Imagination will sell its MIPS business to Tallwood, a California-based venture capital firm, for $65m in cash. The sale is expected to close in October. The rest of Imagination is slated to be sold to Canyon Bridge for £550 million in cash (~$740 million), a deal dependent on the MIPS sale. The Chinese-backed investment firm has featured recently in the news for its attempted purchas... » read more

Verifying AI, Machine Learning


[getperson id="11306" comment="Raik Brinkmann"], president and CEO of [getentity id="22395" e_name="OneSpin Solutions"], sat down to talk about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neuromorphic chips. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What's changing in [getkc id="305" kc_name="machine learning"]? Brinkmann: There’s a real push toward computing at the edge. ... » read more

Functional Safety For FPGA-Based Hardware Designs


Advances in design and manufacturing technology allow increased factory automation, where tasks are automatically performed by sophisticated equipment such as industrial robots. Manufacturing processes require fail-safe mechanisms to prevent human injury or costly downtime. With increasing sophistication and automation of the manufacturing processes, there is increasing need for error detection... » read more

When Is Verification Complete?


Deciding when verification is done is becoming a much more difficult decision, prompting verification teams to increasingly rely on metrics rather than just the tests listed in the verification plan. This trend has been underway for the past couple of process nodes, but it takes time to spot trends and determine whether they are real or just aberrations. The Wilson Research Group conducts a ... » read more

Tech Talk: DO-254


Aldec's Louie De Luna explains the safety critical standard for the aerospace industry and how that parallels what's happening in automotive electronics. https://youtu.be/qa1g1NNVj60 » read more

Machine Learning Meets IC Design


Machine Learning (ML) is one of the hot buzzwords these days, but even though EDA deals with big-data types of issues it has not made much progress incorporating ML techniques into EDA tools. Many EDA problems and solutions are statistical in nature, which would suggest a natural fit. So why is it so slow to adopt machine learning technology, while other technology areas such as vision recog... » read more

Cutting CapEx, Not Capacity


‘The cloud’ has been an industry buzz word for some time now, and while the initial focus was on data storage and sharing - and spawned the likes of Dropbox – ‘cloud computing’ is currently the latest trend. For instance, Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), gives users access to servers and a range of applications. Storage is available as before but so too now are... » read more

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