Week 33: Changes To The DAC Show Floor


At this point in my blogging/vlogging career I’m assuming I have an audience of thousands who hang on my every word. But the few of you left (okay, so this is tongue in cheek… I have in fact seen the number of YouTube views!) who have not seen my DAC TV interview with Brian Fuller (below) need to know that we are changing DAC exhibit hours and moving the evening receptions on Monday and Tue... » read more

Redefining Progress


After lots of wrangling over the whether Moore's Law is alive, dead, or languishing at somewhere in between, that discussion now seems about as relevant as the look and feel of Apple's early Macintosh operating system—an issue that back in the 1980s spawned a very public war with Microsoft. Today that argument is about as relevant as whether Betamax was better than VHS. Whether it's Moor... » read more

Signal Integrity Issues


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss signal integrity with Rob Aitken, research fellow at [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"]; PV Srinivas, senior director of engineering for the Place & Route Division of [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; and Bernard Murphy, chief technology officer at [getentity id="22026" e_name="Atrenta"]. What follows are excerpts of that conver... » read more

Week 32: So Many Good Proposals


On Monday we had our marathon conference call to review all invited content – that is, special sessions in EDA, embedded, automotive, and security, as well as panels and tutorials. Wow! I was blown away, and it seems we must have a record year for submitted content. I counted 27 submissions just for tutorials, a niche part of DAC (though an important one at that). There is a DAC record for em... » read more

Unraveling Power Methodologies


When working on articles, the editors at Semiconductor Engineering sometimes hear things that make them stand back and question what seems to be an industry truth. One such statement happened last month while researching a different article. The statement was: Most designs are not top-down, but in fact bottom-up when it comes to power management. The most used methodology today is that the RTL... » read more

IP Design Essentials For Reliability And SoC Integration


IP is integral to every SoC design. The need for ubiquitous connectivity has pushed the threshold for content in SoCs even beyond the tenets of Moore’s Law. Technology scaling has not only enabled the delivery of increased performance and reduced power, but also rich content through the integration of a wide range of IPs such as radio devices, CMOS image sensors, MEMs, etc., into a single ... » read more

Is Your IP-Verification Environment Trying To Kill You?


I was watching an old episode of The Office the other night. It was the one where a GPS guided the lead characters into a lake. While we've all fallen victim to a GPS gone bad. Most of us are fortunate enough not to trust technology blindly enough to drive into a lake (or in my case, onto the tarmac at Ft. Lauderdale International). Yet, it's surprisingly easy to find parallels in real life whe... » read more

Developing High-Performance, Low-Power Audio/Voice Subsystems Using Customizable DSP Blocks And Audio Interface IP


As applications such as mobile gaming and voice triggering grow in popularity, audio/voice subsystems are becoming more important in many mobile system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Subsystem requirements have evolved to address multiple demands: high-performance, high-resolution audio stream processing, and always-on, low-power voice trigger and recognition. This white paper describes how customizabl... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


IP Cadence rolled out a fourth-generation audio/voice DSP core for 32-bit DTS-X audio/voice processing, using multi-channel object-based audio. The technology allows for more textured 3D sound, while simplifying the steps for creating sound channels. Chips NXP rolled out a one-chip solution for smart car access, which combines passive keyless entry, an RF transmitter and an immobilizer. Th... » read more

Week 30: Recovering From Holiday Travel…


Happy New Year! The good news is that one more weekend looms, maybe a useful window for recovery if your batteries are running low after hustling around during the holidays as I did. Packed roads, busy airports, standing in line, being impatient, getting angry… I admit wondering, as my seasonal spirit waned, why we all do this to ourselves? My destination was Germany, so I could spend Christm... » read more

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