The Insatiable Need For Bandwidth


With the push for more and more Wi-Fi bandwidth, the WLAN industry, its standards committees, and the Ethernet switch manufacturers are having a hard time keeping up with the need for more speed. As the industry prepares for upgrading to 802.11ac Wave 2 and the promise of 11ax, the ability of Ethernet over existing copper wiring to meet the increased transfer speeds is being challenged. And wha... » read more

The Hunt For A Low-Power PHY


Physics has been on the side of chipmakers throughout most of the lifetime of [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"], but when dealing with the world outside the chip, physics is working against them. Pushing data at ever-faster rates through boards and systems consumes increasing amounts of power, but the power budget for chips has not been increasing. Could chips be constrained by their int... » read more

HBM2: It’s All About The PHY


HBM DRAM is currently used in graphics, high-performance computing (HPC), server, networking and client applications. HBM, says JEDEC HBM Task Group Chairman Barry Wagner, provides a “compelling solution” to reduce the IO power and memory footprint for the most demanding applications. Recent examples of second-generation HBM deployment include NVIDIA’s Quadro GP100 GPU which is paired wit... » read more

The Challenges Of Designing An HBM2 PHY


Originally targeted at the graphics industry, HBM continues to gain momentum in the server and networking markets as system designers work to move higher bandwidth closer to the CPU. Expanding DRAM capacity – which boosts overall system performance – allows data centers to maximize local DRAM storage for wide throughput. HBM DRAM architecture effectively increases system memory bandwidth... » read more

802.XX And The IoE


Ever since the first 802.11 standard was published in 1997, it has evolved to become the de facto protocol for much of the wireless networking across a wide range of devices and implementations. Today the protocol family includes 802.b 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, and 802.11ac, respectively. Some of these will play a very important role in the IoE. There are other 802.xx protocols (such as 802.15... » read more

One PHY Does Not Fit All


Consumers expect their battery-operated mobile devices to be faster, smaller and more reliable while providing greater functionality at a reduced cost. Most of all, consumers demand longer battery life and 24/7 access to data. To meet these demands, consumer system-on-a-chip (SoC) designers must make tradeoffs between features, performance, power and cost. Enterprise SoC designers have their... » read more

Collaboration Accelerates Moore’s Law


Moore's Law dictates that the number of transistors in dense, integrated circuits will double approximately every two years. Maintaining this pace of scaling, however, has become increasingly difficult given the ever-increasing complexity inherent with new chip starts. Additionally, the cost of using leading-edge process technology is prohibitively expensive. As a result, collaboration amon... » read more

Memory Matters For Mid-Range Mobile Devices


In recent months, we’ve seen signs of saturation in the high-end mobile device market where smartphones and tablets retail for more than $300. The largest growth in the mobile device markets are in Asia, with China in particular showing an annual growth rate of more than 50% in the mid-range ($100-$299) market while low-end products retail for less than $50! Features like storage capacity,... » read more

Experts At The Table: Who Pays For Low Power?


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss the cost of low power with Fadi Gebara, research staff member for IBM’s Austin Research Lab; David Pan, associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Texas; Aveek Sarkar, vice president of product engineering and support at Apache Design; and Tim Whitfield, director o... » read more

Managing Electrical Communications Better


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Managing the electrical components of signal paths between IC, package, board and system is no small task, and it’s only growing in complexity. Understanding how to correctly optimize the communications within a system is critical given that the I/O power is becoming a significant portion of the overall chip power as the number of bits and the speed at which t... » read more

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