Where Is The Software For Shift Left?


Co-development of hardware and software has been a dream for a long time, but significant hurdles remain. Neither domain is ready with what the other requires at the appropriate time. The earlier something can be done in a development flow, the less likely problems will be found when they are more difficult or expensive to fix. It may require both tool and methodology changes, so that a proc... » read more

Toward Software-Defined Vehicles


Speed is everything when it comes to designing automotive electronics, but not in the usual way. In the past, product cycles often lasted five to seven years, from initial design to implementation inside of vehicles. That no longer works as vehicles adopt more electronic features to replace mechanical ones, and as competition heats up over the latest features and nearly instantaneous over-the-a... » read more

New Memory Architecture For Local Differential Privacy in Hardware


A technical paper titled "Two Birds with One Stone: Differential Privacy by Low-power SRAM Memory" was published by researchers at North Carolina State University, University of South Alabama, and University of Tennessee. Abstract "The software-based implementation of differential privacy mechanisms has been shown to be neither friendly for lightweight devices nor secure against side-channe... » read more

Optimizing Energy At The System Level


Power is a ubiquitous concern, and it is impossible to optimize a system's energy consumption without considering the system as a whole. Tremendous strides have been made in the optimization of a hardware implementation, but that is no longer enough. The complete system must be optimized. There are far reaching implications to this, some of which are driving the path toward domain-specific c... » read more

Simplifying AI Edge Deployment


Barrie Mullins, vice president of product at Flex Logix, explains how a programmable accelerator chip can simplify semiconductor design at the edge, where chips need to be high performance as well as low power, yet developing everything from scratch is too expensive and time-consuming. Programmability allows these systems to stay current with changes in algorithms, which can affect everything f... » read more

Algorithm HW Framework That Minimizes Accuracy Degradation, Data Movement, And Energy Consumption Of DNN Accelerators (Georgia Tech)


This new research paper titled "An Algorithm-Hardware Co-design Framework to Overcome Imperfections of Mixed-signal DNN Accelerators" was published by researchers at Georgia Tech. According to the paper's abstract, "In recent years, processing in memory (PIM) based mixed-signal designs have been proposed as energy- and area-efficient solutions with ultra high throughput to accelerate DNN com... » read more

Polynesia, A Novel Hardware/Software Cooperative Design for In-Memory HTAP Databases


A team of researchers from ETH Zurich, Google and Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently published a technical paper titled "Polynesia: Enabling High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Databases with Hardware/Software Co-Design". Abstract (partial) "We propose Polynesia, a hardware–software co-designed system for in-memory HTAP [hybrid transactional/anal... » read more

HW/SW Co-Design to Configure DNN Models On Energy Harvesting Devices


New technical paper titled "EVE: Environmental Adaptive Neural Network Models for Low-Power Energy Harvesting System" was published by researchers at UT San Antonio, University of Connecticut, and Lehigh University. According to the abstract: "This paper proposes EVE, an automated machine learning (autoML) co-exploration framework to search for desired multi-models with shared weights for... » read more

The Challenge Of Optimizing Chip Architectures For Workloads


It isn't possible to optimize a workload running on a system just by looking at hardware or software separately. They need to be developed together and intricately intertwined, an engineering feat that also requires bridging two worlds with have a long history of operating independently. In the early days of computing, hardware and software were designed and built by completely separate team... » read more

Domain-Specific Design Drives EDA Changes


The chip design ecosystem is beginning to pivot toward domain-specific architectures, setting off a scramble among tools vendors to simplify and optimize existing tools and methodologies. The move reflects a sharp slowdown in Moore's Law scaling as the best approach for improving performance and reducing power. In its place, chipmakers — which now includes systems companies — are pushing... » read more

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