Blog Review: Jan. 29


ARM’s Ellie Stone returns from the Mobile Games Forum in London with some insights about where the future competition will come from. No. 4 on her list is the big surprise. Cadence’s Brian Fuller has unearthed an old black & white AT&T video that makes you wonder how they created wire. So that’s what happens when you heat a semiconductor with a Bunsen burner. What’s the real val... » read more

Experts At The Table: What’s Missing In The IoT


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of the IoT with Oleg Logvinov, director of market development for STMicroelectronics’ Industrial and Power Conversion Division; Martin Lund, senior vice president of the IP Group at Cadence; Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; and Damon Hernandez, a member of the Web3D Consortium. What follows are excerpts of that conver... » read more

Sensory Overload


There are two new buzzwords—always on and context-aware—that have the potential to transform devices and the way in which we use them. Both are related to smartphones at the moment, but this just the initial place where their impact is being felt. Both concepts add the potential for smartphones to become part of the Internet of Things (IoT) because they enable meaningful interactions bet... » read more

HotChips: Power8


It’s another year, another HotChips Conference and another update on IBM’s POWER processor. IBM continues to impress with its big iron processor, and this year it’s the new POWER8. IBM announced more details of its new POWER8 processor at HotChips and IBM now joins Intel at 22nm, but with the twist that IBM’s process is based on SOI technology. The POWER8 quadruples the thread count ... » read more

The Power Of Low Power


In the United States, new rules that cars will need to average 54.5 miles per gallon by the year 2025, and 35.5 mpg by 2016, suddenly seem very achievable. In fact, some cars in development are reporting close to an equivalent of nearly 100 mpg, and the numbers are likely to go well into the triple digits. The same kinds of results are showing up in handheld mobile devices, which now have th... » read more

Equivalence Checking


Everyone is consumed by power these days. The less power our devices use, the better—the longer our batteries will last, the more applications we can use simultaneously, the less HVAC capacity is required by the data center, etc. Clock-gating is one widely used technique to save power in ASIC designs. However, clock gating can significantly impact the structural and behavioral elements of the... » read more

Performance Or Power?


For high-volume chips, such as those slated for mobile devices such as tablets or smart phones, energy efficiency is absolutely critical. For very high-value chips, which are the ones that show up in PCs or servers, the focus is more on performance and how efficiently that performance is obtained. And for the stuff in the middle, notably the Internet of things, the commodity servers and automot... » read more

Mixing Custom And Standard Parts


By Ed Sperling The amount of third-party and re-used IP content in an SoC is on the rise, but once a decision to buy vs. make has been made it doesn’t always stay that way. In fact, chipmakers are swinging the pendulum back and forth across a variety of chips, building IP themselves, standardizing on another vendor’s IP, then sometimes rolling it back the other way. The reasons are usua... » read more

Experts At The Table: Who Pays For Low Power?


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss the cost of low power with Fadi Gebara, research staff member for IBM’s Austin Research Lab; David Pan, associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas; Aveek Sarkar, vice president of product engineering and support at Apache Design; and Tim Whitfield, director ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Who Pays For Low Power?


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss the cost of low power with Fadi Gebara, research staff member for IBM’s Austin Research Lab; David Pan, associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas; Aveek Sarkar, vice president of product engineering and support at Apache Design; and Tim Whitfield, director o... » read more

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