Power Now First-Order Concern In More Markets


Concerns about energy and power efficiency are becoming as important as performance in markets where traditionally there has been a significant gap, setting the stage for significant shifts in both chip architectures and in how those ICs are designed in the first place. This shift can be seen in a growing number of applications and vertical segments. It includes mobile devices, where batteri... » read more

Why Comparing Processors Is So Difficult


Every new processor claims to be the fastest, the cheapest, or the most power frugal, but how those claims are measured and the supporting information can range from very useful to irrelevant. The chip industry is struggling far more than in the past to provide informative metrics. Twenty years ago, it was relatively easy to measure processor performance. It was a combination of the rate at ... » read more

Robots Become More Useful In Factories


Most people associate factory automation with large robotic machines, such as those that weld automobile chassis on assembly lines. But as prices drop and technology improves, robots are being deployed for smaller and more varied tasks, and they are getting better at all of them. Inside of factories, robots can significantly improve output, consistency, and reliability. They can work around ... » read more

Comparing Formal And Simulation Code Coverage


There is a difference in semantics between code coverage generated from a simulator engine and code coverage generated from a formal engine. This paper seeks to raise the awareness of verification engineers on how best to make use of the code coverage data generated by different verification engines. The paper lays out the reasons for using code coverage and describes how simulation code covera... » read more

Blog Review: March 9


Arm's Ajay Joshi investigates how to select the right benchmark for CPUs used in the Home device market, such as digital television and set-top box/over-the-top devices. Ansys' Jon Kordell checks out how reliability physics simulations and physical component characterization can support component swapping in high-reliability applications when the original part is unavailable due to supply ch... » read more

Navigating The Intersection Of Safety And Security


Vehicle systems and the semiconductors used within them are some of the most complex electronics seen today. In the past, electronics going into vehicle systems implemented flat architectures with isolated functions controlling various components of the power train and vehicle dynamics. However, to support the realization of Level 4 and Level 5 (L4/L5) autonomous driving, a massive restructure ... » read more

Enabling Silicon Lifecycle Solutions


The concepts of product lifecycle management (PLM) should be familiar, although the semiconductor industry has yet to adopt a system for managing the entire lifecycle of a product from inception through design, realization, deployment, and field service, right through to end-of-life activities such as final disposal. Now, a combination of business and technical pressures is bringing PLM capabil... » read more

Verifying Side-Channel Security Pre-Silicon


As security grows in importance, side-channel attacks pose a unique challenge because they rely on physical phenomena that aren’t always modeled for the design verification process. While everything can be hacked, the goal is to make it so difficult that an attacker concludes it isn't worth the effort. For side-channel attacks, the pre-silicon design is the best place to address any known ... » read more

Machine Learning Showing Up As Silicon IP


New machine-learning (ML) architectures continue to appear. Up to now, each new offering has been implemented in a chip for sale, to be placed alongside host processors, memory, and other chips on an accelerator board. But over time, more of this technology could be sold as IP that can be integrated into a system-on-chip (SoC). That trend is evident at recent conferences, where an increasing... » read more

Manufacturing Cyber Security


Designers and manufacturers worldwide are concerned about manufacturing cyber security and design data when using additive manufacturing technology. This whitepaper from Identify3D discusses how digital product data is shared during the additive manufacturing workflow and how that data might be better secured. Using products from Identify3D and Siemens, the entire additive manufacturing data ch... » read more

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