How Secure Is Your SoC?


The Russian Federal Guard Service’s decision to revert to typewriters—machines that leave unique mechanical fingerprints—is a good indicator of just how serious security has become in a world dominated by electronics and pervasive connectivity. What’s less apparent is the growing threat at the SoC level—inside complex chips, between the chip and the board, and between chips on the ... » read more

Trading Off Power And Performance


By Ann Steffora Mutschler There is no shortage of opinions when it comes to the topic of performance and power tradeoffs. From abstracting the task from engineers to process considerations, engineering teams have a number of tools and approaches at their disposal to make the optimal design choices for their application. Take the MCU application space for instance. Ken Dwyer, director of app... » read more

New Reliability Issues Emerge


By Ed Sperling Most consumers define reliability by whether a device turns on and works as planned, but the term is becoming harder to define as complexity increases and systems are interconnected. Adding more functionality in less space has made it more difficult to build complex chips, and it has made it more difficult to prevent problems in those chips. Verification coverage is a persist... » read more

Power And Performance: GSS Sees SOI Advantages For FinFETs


Are FinFETs better on SOI? In a series of papers, high-profile blogs and subsequent media coverage,Gold Standard Simulations (aka GSS) has indicated that, yes, FinFETs should indeed be better on SOI. To those of us not deeply involved in the research world, much of this may seem to come out of nowhere.  But there’s a lot of history here, and in this blog we’ll take a look at what it’s... » read more

Being Different Is Bad


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Today’s SoCs contain as much as 80% existing IP that either has been re-used from previous projects or obtained from a third party. Models are created of this hardware IP, as well as new portions of the design, in order to create a virtual prototype that allows the engineering team to see the complete system by running software and applications. While this a... » read more

EMI Cuts A Wide Swath


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Electromagnetic interference (EMI) cuts across all application segments, whether it’s aerospace and defense and its various tangents, or in a handset, virtually touching a large majority of engineering teams today. The reason this issue affects so many engineering groups is because as modulation schemes become ever more complex they become even more sensitive to ... » read more

More EMI Mitigation


With electromagnetic interference a major design challenge today in any product that sends or receives a signal, determining how to lessen the impact of this phenomenon was addressed to a large extent in my article, “EMI Cuts a Wide Swath,” but there are a few additional techniques that are important to highlight. Erick Olsen, marketing director at NXP explained that higher performance c... » read more

Does SOI matter to the designers using the chips?


By Adele Hars Much of the SOI vs. bulk discussion zeros right in on the manufacturing bottom line:  which is cheaper?   And absolutely, customers want the most cost-effective solution.  But the best of all possible worlds is if you can save them money and give them all the bells and whistles they're looking for, too, right? [caption id="attachment_150" align="alignleft" width="150" capti... » read more

Bridging IP With Verification Standards


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Standards body Accellera is sounding the gong to summon all verification IP providers to check out its efforts in connection with IP-XACT -- IEEE 1685, "Standard for IP-XACT, Standard Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-Using IP Within Tool-Flows” – with verification IP. The IP-XACT technical committee has been busy over the past year. Formerly an effor... » read more

Energy Star Meets Data Security


By Pallab Chatterjee Security technology and low power typically don’t go together in the same sentence, let alone the same device. All of that is starting to change, though. With 2% of the world’s energy being consumed by data centers, the new Energy Star guidelines and their associated tax incentives have been driving IT updates and upgrades since 2009 . The security industry is n... » read more

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