Are Processors Running Out Of Steam?


Check out any smart phone these days and you’ll find some reference to the number of cores in the device. It’s not the number of cores that makes a difference, though—or even the clock speed at which they run. Performance depends on the underlying design for how they’re utilized, how often that happens, how much memory they share, how much interaction there is between the cores, and the... » read more

Tech Talk: Power, Performance And Area In 2.5D


The cost will be comparable at first, but the only way to improve power, performance AND area at the same time will be with a different architectural approach. [youtube vid=XAbE7jpjuMA] » read more

Reduce Power, Area And Routing Congestion


This paper, using an example design, demonstrates how to meet challenging performance, latency and bandwidth goals by using the DesignWare Interconnect Fabric for the ARM® AMBA 3 AXI while minimizing the total area, power consumption and number of top-level wires. The paper also studies the design requirements and examines the optimization features of the DesignWare Interconnect Fabric used to... » read more

Power’s Impact On Hierarchy Modification


RTL restructuring in which the logical hierarchy of a design is modified is usually done to manage complex designs. When power management is added to this task, new challenges crop up. Consider switchable power or voltage domains, which are a common way to manage power is to use switchable power or voltage domains. When implementing this technique, all the logic in such a domain must hang of... » read more

Experts At The Table: What’s Missing In The IoT


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of the IoT with Oleg Logvinov, director of market development for STMicroelectronics’ Industrial and Power Conversion Division; Martin Lund, senior vice president of the IP Group at Cadence; Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open-Silicon; and Damon Hernandez, a member of the Web3D Consortium. What follows are excerpts of that conver... » read more

Low-Power Crisis = Danger & Opportunity


If you’re a student of these things, you’ve no doubt heard that in Japanese, the word “crisis” is divided equally into “danger” and opportunity.” The biggest opportunity for electronics designers is also their biggest challenge: power management. Ask anyone today and they’ll tell you that minding and managing power consumption and leakage is a big concern. How big? At DAC... » read more

Huge Challenges With Billions Of Things


Communication is poised in the next couple of years to cross a line between humans and things—things talking directly to other things as well as to people—setting in motion a series of technological, social and legal issues that will take years or decades to resolve. On one hand, this is made possible by leaps in processing performance and power management in mobile devices. In his keyno... » read more

Uncertainty, But Not Over Power


The semiconductor industry has reached a crossroads. Lithography has stalled out, NRE is rising, and chipmakers are torn between choices of when and whether to jump to the next process node—and even more daunting, the next one after that—or whether to take half steps with fan outs, 2.5D, or fully depleted SOI. While chips do continue to tape out, the number of critical choices that need... » read more

Lessons From The Big Apple


Apple this week announced some big changes in their product lineup. Having already released their MacBook Air with the power-sipping Intel Haswell processor, Apple has made further strides with an operating system upgrade that extends battery life by yet another 10% to 15%. For those deep into technology, you may already know that low-power design capability wasn’t created overnight. It h... » read more

Power Is A Global Issue


Power is now the No. 1 target in developing chips. In a keynote speech at the recent Cadence Verification Summit, James “Jim” Hogan—an EDA investor associated with companies such as Sonics, Nimbic, Solido, AutoESL, Altos and many others, and previously part of Cadence’s Telos venture arm—made the point that power is the big problem that needs to be solved. We all know that reducing... » read more

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