Thinking Small


By Barry Pangrle “But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately—in the great future—we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them (within reason, of course; you can't put them so that they are chemically unstable, for example). — Richard Feynman, ... » read more

Node Skipping Reaches New Heights


By Mark LaPedus For years, silicon foundries have rolled out their respective leading-edge processes roughly on a two-year cadence. The long-standing goal has been to keep foundry customers on a competitive price, power and performance curve. But as leading-edge chipmakers move from the 28nm node and beyond, the predictable process progression is changing. And the phenomenon of “node skip... » read more

Keeping The Balance


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The brains of datacenters today are more powerful than ever due to technology advancements in chip architectures and in manufacturing processes that allow more processing power thanks to Moore’s Law. But knowing exactly how and where to configure the processors and cores for optimum throughput and performance within a certain power budget raises a number of qu... » read more

Firms Rethink Fabless-Foundry Model


By Mark LaPedus As chipmakers move toward 20nm designs, finFETs and 3D stacked devices, the industry is beginning to re-think the fabless-foundry model. Leading-edge foundries are finally getting serious about the “virtual IDM” model, in which vendors will act more like integrated device manufacturers (IDMs), as opposed to being mere production partners. In this model, the found... » read more

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, direct... » read more

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

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

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