Power And Performance: GSS Sees SOI Advantages For FinFETs


Are FinFETs better on SOI? In a series of papers, high-profile blogs and subsequent media coverage,Gold Standard Simulations (aka GSS) has indicated that, yes, FinFETs should indeed be better on SOI. To those of us not deeply involved in the research world, much of this may seem to come out of nowhere.  But there’s a lot of history here, and in this blog we’ll take a look at what it’s... » read more

Being Different Is Bad


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Today’s SoCs contain as much as 80% existing IP that either has been re-used from previous projects or obtained from a third party. Models are created of this hardware IP, as well as new portions of the design, in order to create a virtual prototype that allows the engineering team to see the complete system by running software and applications. While this a... » read more

The Trouble With Models


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Models and modeling concepts seem to be on the tip of every tongue these days. Once the promise of sparking true ESL design, the use of system-level models has settled into something more like enabling software development. There is also talk of leveraging models across the supply chain, but is this really possible yet? The concept of doing this incremental refinem... » read more

Merger In Progress


By Jon McDonald June's been an interesting month, I was at the Design Automation Conference, DAC, in San Francisco, then a week later, the Freescale Technology Forum, FTF. DAC is generally more of a hardware design conference, while FTF generally is a bit more focused on software and systems. This year I was surprised at the similarities in some of the discussions at both shows. At DAC ther... » read more

IP Tagging Resurfaces


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down with Kathy Werner, IP strategy and business manager inside of Freescale’s Design Technology Organization, to discuss tagging of soft IP. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: How new is the concept of IP tagging? Werner: IP tagging has been around for a long time. VSI Alliance was one of the first standards organizations that l... » read more

SoC Design In 5 Years


By Ed Sperling The semiconductor industry is used to looking at changes every couple of years, based upon the progression of Moore’s Law. But look out further, over the next five years when the most advanced process node is somewhere between 14nm and 16nm, and the job of designing and manufacturing an SoC will look very different. At the center of this change are three very significant tr... » read more

Mobile Applications Drive New Architectures


By Pallab Chatterjee The push toward mobility in consumer devices is having an impact on the entire component flow. Mobile devices are dominated by two key factors—an overriding power constraint and very high data bandwidth. The power constraints are on the mobile device side and on the cloud-based support server side. The high data bandwidth issues are due to the limited processing powe... » read more

MEMS on SOI – Growing Fast and Faster


By Adele Hars In the latest ASN posting by Dr. Eric Mounier of Yole Developpement, “SOI for MEMS: A Promising Material”, he notes that SOI MEMS is growing at a CAGR (2011-2015) of 15.6%, compared to 8.1% for bulk silicon-based solutions. MEMS designers are doing amazing things on SOI – which would explain that impressive growth rate. [caption id="attachment_12" align="aligncenter... » read more

The Enterprise Effect


By Pallab Chatterjee In the enterprise it’s all about speed and power—as in more speed and less power—and those changes are forcing shifts in the chip architectures as well as the processes used to develop those chips. At the Linley Data Center Conference the next generation of network control chips were discussed. The keys for the new networks are 10G data lanes to be used with 10G/4... » read more

What’s A Cell Phone?


By Ed Sperling Just because a smart phone is sold by Verizon or AT&T mobile no longer means that it will be used primarily as a phone. That distinction may sound trivial, but it has deep implications for the components that are used inside of these devices, how they’re used, and who wins the designs. Shifts such as this can also lead to broad changes in who buys the tools to develop t... » read more

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