Verification Of Functional Safety (Part 2)


The automotive industry is grappling with a tradeoff between cost and safety. Safety is well understood in industries that are cost-insensitive, such as aerospace and medical, and the consumer industry has a long track record of driving down costs while increasing functionality. But can these two industries be brought together in a safe and effective manner to enable automobiles to achieve the ... » read more

A Complete Guide To Enclosure Thermal Design… 14 Key Considerations


Enclosure design is an important aspect of system level thermal management to ensure electronics performance and reliability. Learn how to improve enclosure design in this guide covering 14 considerations on thermal management best practice. Examples of areas to focus on for advantages in cooling efficiency are illustrated and where tradeoff decisions are needed. Newly updated as of 2018, this... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 21


Mentor's Colin Walls posits that one part of the reason modern code has so many bugs may be the way we talk about them, and it's time for a change in terminology. Following up on a post about the challenges of bringing digital literacy to an area where many are unable to read, Cadence's Madhavi Rao looks at the impact agriculture-focused IoT technologies could have on rural areas in India. ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools & IP Arm unveiled a new suite of IP focused on machine learning for edge devices. Currently dubbed Project Trillium, it includes the Arm ML processor, the second-generation Arm Object Detection (OD) processor, and open-source Arm NN software. The ML processor provides more than 4.6 TOPs in mobile environments with efficiency of 3 TOPs/W. People detection is a focus of the OD processo... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 14


Mentor's Matthew Hogan takes a look at why it's important to establish a baseline reliability verification process and how foundry rule decks fit in. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi digs into the issues with fitness tracker Strava's heatmap, how it could be manipulated, and why the risks of big data analytics go beyond wearables. Cadence's Paul McLellan points to research showing how easy it can ... » read more

Chip Aging Accelerates


Reliability is becoming an increasingly important proof point for new chips as they are rolled out in new markets such as automotive, cloud computing and industrial IoT, but actually proving that a chip will function as expected over time is becoming much more difficult. In the past, reliability generally was considered a foundry issue. Chips developed for computers and phones were designed ... » read more

New Thermal Issues Emerge


Thermal monitoring is becoming more critical as gate density continues to increase at each new node and as chips are developed for safety critical markets such as automotive. This may sound counterintuitive because the whole point of device scaling is to increase gate density. But at 10/7 and 7/5nm, static current leakage is becoming a bigger issue, raising questions about how long [getkc id... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys acquired PhoeniX Software, expanding its photonic integrated circuit design range. Founded in 2003 and based in the Netherlands, PheoniX adds photonic aware physical layout capabilities, enabled by support for foundry-specific PDKs, along with a full photonic chip design package. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Siemens PLM Software will acquire Sarokal Test Systems, w... » read more

Bridging Machine Learning’s Divide


There is a growing divide between those researching [getkc id="305" comment="machine learning"] (ML) in the cloud and those trying to perform inferencing using limited resources and power budgets. Researchers are using the most cost-effective hardware available to them, which happens to be GPUs filled with floating point arithmetic units. But this is an untenable solution for embedded infere... » read more

How Robust Is Your ESD Protection? Are You Sure?


Electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection is critical at advanced nodes to safeguard designs against effects intensified by shrinking transistor dimensions and oxide layer thicknesses. On the other hand, ESD protection checks are consuming vastly more runtime and memory due to the growing die sizes of system-on-chips (SoCs) and the number of transistors they can hold. Designers are facing increa... » read more

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