Getting To A Connected World, Step-by-Step


I recently bought myself an activity tracker. The watch-like device keeps track of how many steps I take and how high I climb, such as the number of vertical feet I “conquer” by taking the stairs. From that, it calculates the distance I travel and the amount of calories that I burn in a day. The device also can measure my heart rate and the oxygen level in my blood, but given the high heart... » read more

Pointing Fingers, Often In The Wrong Direction


Every design these days, regardless of whether it’s a processor, an SoC, an ASIC, FPGA or stacked die, relies on a combination of re-used and third-party intellectual property. No company—not even Intel, Apple or Samsung—has the capability of building everything itself within a highly compressed market window. There is a spectrum of IP use and re-use, of course. In some cases, it may i... » read more

One Design Kit?


On a typical System-on-Chip (SoC), CPUs, GPUs and DSPs each have unique requirements to achieve optimal results from logic libraries and memory compilers. However, at the end of the day, they all reside in the same EDA database that goes through an EDA flow of timing closure, area/power minimization and physical/logical verification before tapeout. Instead of each processor having its own de... » read more

big.LITTLE Technology: The Future of Mobile


With the evolution from the first mobile phones through smartphones to today’s superphones and tablets, the demand for compute performance in mobile devices has grown at an incredible rate. Today’s devices need to service smarter and more complex interactions, such as voice and gesture control, combined with seamless and reliable content delivery. Gaming and user interfaces have also grown ... » read more

Ultra Low Power Integrated Platform For Connectivity And Audio/Voice/Sensing


A look at an integrated approach on a single DSP and why it's needed. To download this white paper, click here. » read more

Leveraging Processor Extensibility To Build An Ultra Low-Power Embedded Subsystem


There is increasing demand for electronic devices to execute more functions while consuming less power and silicon area. To achieve this, systems instantiating multiple, heterogeneous processor cores optimized for low power and high performance are gaining popularity among design teams. In these systems, one or more deeply embedded processors execute a limited set of dedicated applications. The... » read more

Hiding The Electronic Crumbs


Imagine an old Western movie where the posse tracks the outlaws by following footsteps on a dirt trail or looking for broken branches. Now fast forward to the present, where the trail is electronic, the posse is comprised of bad guys, and the loot is frequently encrypted. As any security expert will concede, every security system can be compromised, every chip can be reverse engineered and h... » read more

Executive Insight: Charlie Cheng


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Charlie Cheng, CEO of Kilopass Technologies, to talk about his role in transforming the company. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Can you talk about your existing product and its evolution? Cheng: The founders discovered a new type of [Non Volatile (NVM), One Time Programmable (OTP)] memory and protected it with a number of patents.... » read more

Pain Management


In part one of this series, the focus was on overlapping and new pain points in the semiconductor flow, from initial conception of what needs to be in a chip all the way through to manufacturing. Part two looks at how companies are attempting to manage that pain. It’s no secret that [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"]s are getting more complicated to design, debug and build, but the complexity i... » read more

Blog Review: April 9


Mentor’s Colin Walls discovered an interesting video of the software programming learning process—a teacher responding literally to commands from his students on how to make a jam sandwich. It’s harder than it looks. Cadence’s Brian Fuller captures a speech by his colleague, Sanjiv Taneja, about the need for a comprehensive verification approach and smart IP reuse. The overriding th... » read more

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