A Tale of Two Testers


David Tacelli, president and CEO of Xcerra, was excited. His company’s reception for customers (and the press) at the Trou Normand restaurant in San Francisco’s hip South of Market neighborhood was going very well. Gourmet salames and other tasty foods were on offer, along with fine wines and craft ales and beers. He gleefully pointed out to editors that the product to be introduced at t... » read more

CCIX Enables Machine Learning


It takes a lot of technology to enable something like machine learning, and not all of it is as glamorous as neural network architectures and algorithms. Several levels below that is the actual hardware on which these run, and that brings us into the even less sexy world of interfaces. One such interface, the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX), pronounced C6, aims to make th... » read more

Come Together Right Now Over… Virtual Prototypes


As a frequent traveler and gadgets enthusiast I love the concept of all my devices being connected. However, more often than not I experience a divide which is sometimes caused by bad software and sometimes caused by missing hardware interfaces. My recent frustration was related to my tablet missing a USB port to upload new maps to my GPS device. The GPS device became a divided, isolated pi... » read more

Building One Interface Subsystem For Multiple IoT SoCs


When designing SoCs for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, designers quickly realize that their most efficient use of resources will result in chips that can address multiple end applications. Consumer products require connectivity or edge devices, and networking or enterprise companies are broadening their reach to home networking and cloud services, like remote processing, that complement... » read more

Cloud Computing Chips Changing


An explosion in cloud services is making chip design for the server market more challenging, more diverse, and much more competitive. Unlike datacenter number crunching of the past, the cloud addresses a broad range of applications and data types. So while a server chip architecture may work well for one application, it may not be the optimal choice for another. And the more those tasks beco... » read more

Supporting CPUs Plus FPGAs (Part 3)


While it has been possible to pair a CPU and FPGA for quite some time, two things have changed recently. First, the industry has reduced the latency of the connection between them and second, we now appear to have the killer app for this combination. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these changes and the state of the tool chain to support this combination, with Kent Orthner, system... » read more

Conflicting Goals In Data Centers


Two conflicting goals are emerging inside of data centers—speed at any cost, and the ability to extend hardware well beyond its expected lifetime to amortize that cost. Layered across both of those are concerns about how to move data back and forth more efficiently, how to secure it, and how to best integrate different generations of technology. But these widely different goals have create... » read more

Supporting CPUs Plus FPGAs (Part 1)


While it has been possible to pair a CPU and FPGA for quite some time, two things have changed recently. First, the industry has reduced the latency of the connection between them and second, we now appear to have the killer app for this combination. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these changes and the state of the tool chain to support this combination, with Kent Orthner, system... » read more

Five Pitfalls In PCIe-Based NVMe Controller Verification


Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) is gaining rapidly in mindshare among consumers and vendors. Some industry analysts are forecasting that PCIe-based NVMe will become the dominant storage interface over the next few years. With its high-performance and low-latency characteristics, and its availability for virtually all platforms, NVMe is a game changer. For the first time, storage devices and ... » read more

An Easier Path To Faster C With FPGAs


For most scientists, what is inside a high-performance computing platform is a mystery. All they usually want to know is that a platform will run an advanced algorithm thrown at it. What happens when a subject matter expert creates a powerful model for an algorithm that in turn automatically generates C code that runs too slowly? FPGA experts have created an answer. More and more, the genera... » read more

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