Experts At The Table: Hardware-Software Co-Design


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss hardware-software co-design with Frank Schirrmeister, group marketing director for Cadence’s System and Software Realization Group; Shabtay Matalon, ESL market development manager at Mentor Graphics; Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris; Narendra Konda, director of hardware engineering at Nvdia; and Jack Greenbaum, directo... » read more

Roundtable: Bridging Hardware And Software


System-Level Design talks about where the problems are with hardware-software co-design and how much progress we've made with Narendra Konda of Nvidia, Frank Schirrmeister of Cadence, Shabtay Matalon of Mentor Graphics, Kurt Shuler of Arteris and Jack Greenbaum of Green HIlls Software. [youtube vid=EOUPsDOYGq8] » read more

Finite Math


In his keynote speech at the Mentor User-To-User conference yesterday, Sameer Halepete, Nvidia’s vice president of LSI engineering, made a very interesting point. At all levels of computing, from smartphones to the data center, the power budget is fixed, and the old ways of addressing it aren’t working. What that means is that there will not be a single solution to reducing power. It ca... » read more

Reliability Concerns Grow


By Ed Sperling Knowing when to signoff on an IC design has always been as much art as science, matching engineering experience with managed risk. As ICs become more complex, however, even the most advanced chip companies are getting things wrong. Some of this can be fixed through software and some of it can be tweaked with programmable firmware. But some of it may have to be fixed in the ne... » read more

Processor Subject To Change


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With power complexity driving sophisticated management techniques, SoC design engineering teams are turning to a new class of customizable processor architectures from ARM, CEVA, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Tensilica and others to take advantage of the best in power saving techniques. While these new architectures are novel approaches, the concepts are not especially new,... » read more

Thinking Differently About Power


By Ed Sperling Battery life and lower electricity bills are now marketing tools for makers of SoCs, the mobile devices they go into, and servers that power data centers. A smart phone battery that lasts through the day without a charge, even when the user is playing high-action games, is a lot more attractive than one lasting only a few hours. And a data center electricity bill that shows a sh... » read more

Innovation At The Core


By Barry Pangrle A number of next-generation ARM-based multi-core systems are starting to show up in the press. Nvidia has released information on its upcoming Tegra 3 (also known as “Kal El”). At last week’s ARM Techcon in Santa Clara, ARM gave several presentations around its Cortex-A7 (Kingfisher) and Cortex-A15 (Eagle) architectures and collectively about its big.LITTLE strategy. Qua... » read more

Tech Talk: Graphic Headaches


Nvidia senior vice president of GPU engineering Jonah Alben talks with System-Level Design about the challenges of designing a graphics chip at advanced process nodes. [youtube vid=3Nc77aVH94g] » read more

Let The Mobile Games Begin


By Pallab Chatterjee Mobile devices today are optimized for low- to mid-bandwidth data transmission, which is sufficient for e-mail, batch downloads of applications and music, and playback of encoded/compressed streaming video. But in coming months they will add another feature—image capture and processing and advanced graphics processing. This adds a whole new wrinkle to mobile devices, ... » read more

The Missing Pieces In Power Modeling—And Who’s Going To Provide Them


By Ed Sperling The push to develop power models is growing at each node, and at 22nm it will be virtually impossible to proceed without one or more models for power. Providing these kind of models is easier said than done, however. Creating an accurate power model requires accurate data from all the other pieces on a chip that potentially can affect the power. That includes how third-party ... » read more

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