Making A Multicore System Work


If you think designing a single-core system is hard, designing multicore systems is multiple times harder. Connecting all the pieces together and making them work properly, if not together, is one of the hardest tasks design engineers and architects will ever face. System-Level Design tracked down some of the experts in this field and sat them down around a table to discuss what’s going... » read more

Houston…We Have A System-Level Problem


[youtube vid=iZ61OU12TNU] Just imagine what happens when the guidance system on the International Space Station goes on the fritz and the entire lab begins doing somersaults through outer space. Then the solar panels no longer work and the communication system fails, and suddenly you understand how serious system-level design problems can become. Ret. Capt. Daniel Bursch recounts the inciden... » read more

Verifying ASICs with FPGA Arrays


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Cross-Talking with TLM 2.0


By Ed Sperling It’s almost like flying over the Great Plains of the United States. On the ground it’s hard to see above the corn stalks, but in an airplane you can see the entire horizon even if you can’t see those stalks anymore. The analogy is similar to where most of the major players in chip design say the engineering for systems on chips needs to go. With millions more gates avai... » read more

New Challenges For Hardware Engineers


  It used to be fun to be a chip architect. You could wake up in the morning, grab a cup of strong black coffee and run through a few power and performance tradeoff calculations before deciding on the high-level architecture. That would set the engineering direction for months, if not years. On a good day, after introducing a steady infusion of caffeine into your bloodstream, you felt like ... » read more