GPUs May Speed UP EDA Algorithms


The sequential EDA algorithms of old cannot keep pace with increasing design complexity, which is driving the industry to look at parallelism and other computational architectures such as the graphical processing unit (GPU). A 10X or 20X speedup for gate-level simulations means that a test that runs today in a week will run in less than a day, and a test that runs today in a month will run i... » read more

The Green500 And The Charge Towards Exascale Computing


The latest Green500 list (Excel spreadsheet here) was just released at the end of June, and heterogeneous systems continue to dominate the top of the list with the new leader besting the old by nearly 30%. Two systems using Intel Xeon E5-2687W 8-Core 3.1 GHz processors coupled with NVIDIA K20’s topped the list. Eurotech’s Eurora and Aurora Tigon both broke the 3,000 MFLOPS/W barrier, record... » read more

Life After Smartphones


By Frank Ferro Don’t let the title confuse you. Smartphones are not going away anytime soon. In fact this year’s smartphone shipments have exceeded feature phones for the first time, with a total of 216 million units in Q1, according to IDC, and the overall mobile phone market is expected to grow 4.3% in 2013. This volume represents an increase in smartphone sales of 42% from Q1 2012. ... » read more

Faster Assembly Required


Speeding up production has been a mantra dating back throughout recorded history, and presumably well before that. That’s what technology was created for—roads, bridges aqueducts, computers, the Internet, and everything that connects the real to the virtual world. A speech by Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally at DAC that complex SoCs should only take a couple weeks to design by two guys ... » read more

Automotive Power Concerns


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With advanced semiconductor technologies infiltrating the automotive market in ever new and exciting ways, there are also challenges to implementation involving power. In fact, power has become a concern in many areas of automotive design. Consider the Tesla, for example. The dashboard features a 17” touchscreen with the entire vehicle controls. This system i... » read more

New Standard!


It’s been a little over four years since the first IEEE 1801 standard was officially published in March 2009, but the standard can trace its roots back to years before that date. On May 30th, the IEEE released a press announcement for the newest version of the standard, IEEE 1801-2013 (a.k.a. UPF 2.1). It takes a considerable amount of effort and attention to detail to produce a solid standar... » read more

Bigger Wafers, Bigger Risk


At 22/20/16/14nm the semiconductor industry is experiencing a rather new twist on Moore’s Law. Smaller, as in smaller feature sizes, is no longer assumed to be cheaper—or at least not for everyone. In fact, the cost per transistor for the first time in more than half a century could rise in some cases. Whether this outlook improves as the semiconductor industry gains more experience wit... » read more

Power Markets


There has been an ongoing discussion in the industry about the importance of power and performance and which is more important. I submit that the real question is: How much performance can be squeezed out of the power budget for any given market segment? Figure 1. Processor Market Segment Power Budgets Figure 1 shows a rough breakdown of the different market segments for processors, alo... » read more

Experts At The Table: FinFET Questions And Issues


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss the current state and future promise of finFETs, and the myriad challenges, with Ruggero Castagnetti, an LSI fellow; Barry Pangrle, senior power methodology engineer at Nvidia; Steve Carlson, group director of marketing at Cadence; and Mary Ann White, director of product marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts o... » read more

Experts At The Table: FinFET Questions And Issues


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss the current state and future promise of finFETs, and the myriad challenges, with Ruggero Castagnetti, an LSI fellow; Barry Pangrle, senior power methodology engineer at Nvidia; Steve Carlson, group director of marketing at Cadence; and Mary Ann White, director of product marketing at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts o... » read more

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