The Growing Importance Of Subsystems


By Ed Sperling A growing reliance on third-party IP is beginning to expand well beyond just IP blocks and into full subsystems, opening significant growth opportunities for companies competing in this market as well as enormous business and technical challenges. The IP market is ripe for this kind of convergence. Complexity at advanced process nodes coupled with time-to-market demands has e... » read more

Power Panel: IP And Other Key Issues For Future Development


Low-Power Engineering chaired a DesignCon panel of low-power experts with Bhanu Kapoor, president of Mimasic; Kesava Talupuru, DV engineer at MIPS; Prapanna Tiwari, CAE manager at Synopsys, and Rob Aitken, an ARM Fellow. What follows are excerpts of their presentations and the panel discussion that followed. Bhanu Kapoor: There are two components of power—dynamic and leakage. Dynamic is wh... » read more

What’s A Cell Phone?


By Ed Sperling Just because a smart phone is sold by Verizon or AT&T mobile no longer means that it will be used primarily as a phone. That distinction may sound trivial, but it has deep implications for the components that are used inside of these devices, how they’re used, and who wins the designs. Shifts such as this can also lead to broad changes in who buys the tools to develop t... » read more

Embedded Computing Down To Two Major Camps


By Pallab Chatterjee The 2011 CES show was highlighted by the large number of tablet computers and mobile devices that support Internet access. The form factor for these devices is based on use models, but the computing capabilities are based on the power and operational life between charges. The platforms are drawing diving lines between x86 cores vs ARM cores, and CPUs vs GPUs. While on t... » read more

Embedded Computing Down To Two Major Camps


By Pallab Chatterjee The 2011 CES show was highlighted by the large number of tablet computers and mobile devices that support Internet access. The form factor for these devices is based on use models, but the computing capabilities are based on the power and operational life between charges. The platforms are drawing diving lines between x86 cores vs ARM cores, and CPUs vs GPUs. While on t... » read more

Supply Chain Adjusts To Design At The System Level


By Ann Steffora Mutschler System-level design is impacting the supply chain at many levels. Software suppliers, IP providers, semiconductor companies, system integrators and OEMs are challenged to work ever more closely together and find a new balance of power for who controls what in the content of an SoC. “We see more and more the design chain driving how our tools work together,” Fra... » read more

Redefining Performance In Mobile Devices


By Ann Steffora Mutschler While mobile product trends can be reliably unpredictable, devices are definitely moving towards supporting more software-based browsers, plug-ins for browsers, and downloaded codecs to go to browsers. This results in coming up with a best guess for performance targets. Throw power tradeoffs into the mix and things really start to get interesting. In terms of defin... » read more

From Multicore To Many-Core


By Ed Sperling Future SoCs will move from multiple cores—typically two to four in a high-power processor—to dozens of cores. But answers are only beginning to emerge as to where and how those cores will be deployed and how they will be accessed. Just as Moore’s Law forced a move to multicore architectures inside a single processor because of leakage at higher frequencies, it will begi... » read more

Storm Before The Calm


The announcements out of ARM and Intel over the past couple week—and presumably from rivals AMD, MIPS and even Nvidia in coming weeks—are more than just a struggle for one-upmanship. The goal is much more far-reaching and the stakes are significantly higher than who has the fastest processor or core or even the lowest-power version. In the past year there has been a massive push to expan... » read more

The Growing Software Challenge: From Stacks To SMP


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Building a system now includes software, but defining the software stack is a mounting challenge for engineers. What used to be almost exclusively drivers now includes RTOSes and OSes, executable files, middleware, firmware, IP, embedded software and applications. With millions of different embedded products, all with different sets of software, it comes down to pr... » read more

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