Pushing Performance Limits


Trying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of a chip sounds like a good idea, but it increases risk and cost, extends development time, reduced yield, and it may even limit the environments in which the chip can operate. And yet, given the amount of margin added at every step of the development process, it seems obvious that plenty of improvements could be made. "Every design can be o... » read more

Turning Down The Voltage


Designers of large, advanced-node SoCs are grappling with a number of pressures in the quest to achieve the optimal performance and power of their designs. This has turned into a challenging balancing act between using less power, especially for consumer technologies, while also providing the same or greater performance and increased functionality. [getkc id="108" kc_name="Power"] and perfor... » read more

Artifacts Of Custom Checkers In Questa Power-Aware Dynamic Simulation


UPF provides a powerful mechanism to define a custom PA checker or assertion and provides a layer to completely separate it from design code. This is done by embedding the binding of the design and checker within the UPF file through the bind_checker command and its options. As a result, it provides a consolidated verification mechanism and allows Questa PA-SIM to access all instances of a targ... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 7


Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out why DARPA's excited about open-source IP at last year's RISC-V conference. Synopsys' Richard Solomon checks out what's new in PCIe 4.0, from the 16GT/s data rate to lane margining. Mentor's Colin Walls shares another set of tips for embedded software developers, including when to use [ ] and exception handling. Arm's Jason Andrews presents a tutorial ... » read more

Test Innovations For ISO 26262


We are witnessing the gradual transition of the automobile from a simple means of transportation to a mobile electronic hub. The amount of electronic content in passenger cars continues to grow rapidly. Recent reports indicate that electronics now contribute about 40% of the total costs of a traditional internal-combustion-engine car, and this jumps as high as 75% for the growing number of elec... » read more

ECAD-MCAD Co-Design Promotes Automotive First-Pass Success


Achieving first-pass success is the goal of every automotive design team, both electrical and mechanical, as it minimizes or even eliminates costly design iterations. In the automotive industry, first-pass success is more challenging than ever because of the increasing electro-mechanical complexity and density of modern vehicles. Most modern cars run their critical systems, such as the throttle... » read more

Sensors Are Fundamental To New Intelligent Systems


The evolution of intelligent electronic sensors is creating a revolution for IoT and Industrial IoT as companies bring new sensor-based, intelligent systems to market. These systems now incorporate processors and software and they include communication hardware in order to move data into the Cloud for analysis. While the sensor market continues to garner billions of dollars, the average selling... » read more

Deep Learning Spreads


Deep learning is gaining traction across a broad swath of applications, providing more nuanced and complex behavior than machine learning offers today. Those attributes are particularly important for safety-critical devices, such as assisted or autonomous vehicles, as well as for natural language processing where a machine can recognize the intent of words based upon the context of a convers... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 31


Cadence's Paul McLellan looks back at where TSMC was 30 years ago and the founding philosophy that made the foundry and fabless model work. In a video, Mentor's Colin Walls considers how to make the simplest possible multitasking scheduler with a one line RTOS. Synopsys' Sandeep Taneja checks out the technology behind airbags in cars and the role of the Motorola Serial Peripheral Interfac... » read more

Giant Auto Industry Disruption Ahead


The move to self-driving vehicles over the next decade or so will result in a massive restructuring of entire segments of the global economy that have evolved to create and support automobiles and the people who drive them. The shift will create many new jobs-particularly for semiconductors and electronic systems-and conservatively it will eliminate hundreds of thousands of existing ones. It... » read more

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