tag: Intel

Pain Points At 22nm And Beyond
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The roadmap for 22nm has a giant pothole in the middle of it. That hole is supposed to be filled by extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV. Instead it is being patched up using immersion lithography, which is about to cause some monumental headaches for design teams. The difference is comparable to a surgeon using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. The cut isn’t nearly as ... » read more

Making Sense Out Of Convergence
By Ed Sperling - 27 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Technology convergence and market consolidation have always gone hand in hand, although not necessarily in ways everyone expects. The confluence of video and audio was first exhibited by AT&T at the 1964 World’s Fair. The rather crude videophone demonstration promised a future where people could actually see the person they were talking with. Fast forward 45 years and... » read more

Lines Blur Between Processor And Microcontroller
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Big changes are happening in the microcontroller market. That statement alone should give pause for most design engineers and raise their level of skepticism. In the past, microcontrollers were a steady business but not exactly an interesting one. That was before the big push toward “green” and the 65nm process node. And it was before vendors began adding logic and more fun... » read more

Lower Power, Bigger Problems
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low power used to be an afterthought in semiconductor design, and it almost was never a consideration in verification or manufacturability. But at each new process node, the number of power considerations goes up as the line widths go down. To begin with, there are two basic types of power. The first is dynamic, which has been a consideration ever since batteries were added int... » read more

Business In The Time Of Influenza
By Ed Sperling - 29 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

The current round of flu will have lasting repercussions on the electronics industry, whether it turns into the kind of pandemic that killed 50 million to 100 million people in the fall of 1918 or whether it proves to be a localized tragedy. We won’t know that for months, of course. The 1918 flu actually began as a relatively mild illness the previous spring before mutating into one of the ... » read more

Moore’s Law Splinters
By Ed Sperling - 28 Apr, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Moore’s Law continues progressing at a rate of one node every two years or so, but the number of companies that are adhering to that schedule is becoming much harder to pinpoint. Even the nodes themselves are becoming fuzzy. While Intel is looking at 32nm as the next node after 45nm, TSMC is looking at 28nm as the next node after 40nm. And there are likely to be extensions wi... » read more

Easing System Creation With Embedded Hardware Solutions And Standards
By Cheryl Ajluni - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni System creation is today an ultra-complex task. On one hand, developers are confronted with consumer demands for ever more functionality, better performance and increased power efficiency at a lower cost. On the other hand, they face stringent time-to-market requirements and changing standards, coupled with the need to accommodate a range of requirements pertaining to differen... » read more

Taming The Multicore Beast
By Ed Sperling - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Multicore chips are here to stay. Now what? That question is echoing up and down the ranks of tools vendors, design engineers, software developers and even among people who measure the performance and efficiency of semiconductors. There is now a Multicore Expo and a Multicore Association that includes a who’s who of electronics. And there are lots of working groups developing... » read more

Writing Application Software Directly To The Metal
By Ed Sperling - 13 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling How necessary is an operating system? That question would have been considered superfluous a decade ago, possibly even blasphemous and career-limiting. But it now is beginning to surface in low-power discussions, particularly in compute-intensive applications where performance and power are both critical. General-purpose operating systems constantly call on the processor fo... » read more

The Great Debate: Fewer Functions?
By Ed Sperling - 19 Feb, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling What do you do when you can’t fit any more functionality on a chip without blowing your power budget? That question is being debated inside IBM right now, and one of the more radical concepts is to actually have systems do fewer things. “That trend will happen,” said Brad McCredie, chief architect of the Power6 chip and an IBM Fellow. “I think devices w... » read more

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