Better Heterogeneous CPU Designs


The trend toward heterogeneous CPU designs is growing. Case in point: The NXP i.MX7 family of devices have such a design. In this blog, I will discuss the (simple) steps necessary to get the most out of i.MX7 using the ARM Development Studio, more commonly known as DS-5, but the information applies to most similar systems. Compiling code depends greatly on the use case. Within DS-5, there... » read more

Blog Review: April 27


In a video, Cadence's Chris Rowan looks at the future of neural networks, particularly the shift from cloud-based to embedded devices and what we can increasingly expect from them. Waiting for RTL? Mentor's Rich Edelman suggests a way to get tests that are missing some simple RTL running with a bit of SystemVerilog. Synopsys' Richard Solomon provides a primer on calculating the bandwidth ... » read more

Blog Review: April 20


Synopsys' Michael Posner digs into the relationships between USB Type-C, USB 3.1, Power Delivery and DisplayPort specifications. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on a discussion of the memory market's growth in China, and what's on the horizon. Mentor's Andy Macleod looks at the challenges that come with the increased car customization consumers are demanding. An energy-harvesting, t... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mergers & Acquisitions Cadence acquired [getentity id="22444" comment="Rocketick"], an Israel-based company focused on multicore parallel simulation. Founded in 2008, their original rise and claim to fame was acceleration on GPUs, having received significant funding from Nvidia. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal 2016, and terms were not disclosed. Tools &am... » read more

Unexpected Security Holes


Security is emerging as one of the top challenges in semiconductor design across a variety of markets, with the number of security holes growing by orders of magnitude in sectors that have never dealt with these kinds of design constraints before. While security has been a topic of conversation for years in mobile phones and data centers, commercial and industrial equipment is being connecte... » read more

How Long Until You Can Take A Self-Driving Car To DAC?


There is no hotter topic in tech than self-driving cars. How else to explain the worldwide headlines after what can only be described as a modest little fender-bender last month in Mountain View. The culprit was one of Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous Lexus 450h's, by now a media darling/goat. Despite the apparent and very prosaic facts — the Lexus was traveling 2 miles per hour, nobody was hurt,... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tool vendors In terms of sales for 2015, Applied Materials retained the No. 1 position in the wafer fab equipment (WFE) market with 1.3% growth last year, according to Garnter. Lam Research experienced the strongest growth of the top 10 vendors in 2015, moving into the No. 2 position. In the rankings, Lam jumped ahead of ASML and TEL. ASML was in third place, followed in order by TEL, KLA-... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Cadence unveiled the latest updates to its Virtuoso platform, adding enhanced data handling for up to 20X improvement in loading waveform databases in excess of 1GB and a 50X improvement in versioning and loading set-up files into the environment in the Analog Design Environment. Updates to the Layout Suite offer up to 100X accelerated zoom, pan, drag and draw performance on large layo... » read more

Blog Review: April 6


A wall of underground ice is being built to contain contaminated water runoff from the Fukushima nuclear power plant and Swedish researchers want to make windowpanes out of wood, in this week's top tech picks from Ansys' Justin Nescott. Plus, if you're concerned about being spied on by aliens, there's a way the earth could hide. Mentor's Andrew Macleod digs into the problems of centralizing ... » read more

Blog Review: March 30


Are we in a new wave of formal? Mentor's Joe Hupcey III highlights several things from DVCon that indicate formal is becoming a cornerstone of mainstream verification flows. Synopsys' Graham Etchells continues his search for more ways to bring greater efficiency to the FinFET layout process, and the downsides to custom routing solutions. Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a look at TSMC's rapi... » read more

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