Operator Anxiety


Are you one of the early pioneers who have purchased an electric car? In the United States in Q3 2022, 6% of new vehicle sales were pure electric models. Despite all the hype — and significant purchase subsidies in support of battery cars — today only 1% of the cumulative number of vehicles in service in the US are purely plug-in electric. One of the reasons electric car sales have not full... » read more

Growing System Complexity Drives More IP Reuse


IP reuse of both third-party and internal IP is growing, but it's also becoming more complex to manage. There is more IP being used, and more systems into which it needs to be integrated, combined with other IP, and tracked throughout an organization. In some cases, this is an economic requirement. In others, designs are so complex that engineering teams need to focus on where they will make... » read more

What’s The Difference Between An NPU And A GPNPU?


To understand the difference between an NPU (neural processing unit) and a GPNPU (general-purpose neural processing unit) let’s start with the NPU, a processing engine that accelerates machine learning (ML) workloads in System on Chip (SoC) designs. Click here to read more. » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Top Of The News Google announced it will support the RISC-V architecture with the Android open-source operating system. In a keynote at the RISC-V Summit, Lars Bergstrom, Google's director of engineering for the Android Platform Programming Languages, noted that Android currently has more than 3 billion users and the support of more than 24,000 vendors. "We've been following RISC-V for a very ... » read more

Startup Funding: December 2022


The month of December saw six rounds of $100 million or more. The largest, at a massive half-billion dollars, will support manufacturing of 12-inch monocrystalline silicon polished wafers and epitaxial wafers in China. The company is aiming for a production rate of 1 million pieces a month when current expansion is completed. Also in the half-billion club last month is a company making auton... » read more

Adapting To Broad Shifts Essential In 2022


Change creates opportunity, but not every company is able to respond quickly enough to take advantage of those opportunities. Others may respond too quickly, before they properly understand the implications. At the start of a typical year, optimism is in plentiful supply. Any positive trend is seen as continuing, and any negative is seen as turning around. Normally the later in the year that... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Power always has been a function of cost. The more power required, the more it costs to run a device, both in dollars and carbon footprint. This makes the breakthrough in fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory all the more noteworthy, and one that could have significant implications for the future of computing, from data centers to rechargeable batteries in automobiles, robot... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Automaker Toyota and Texas-based electricity distributor Oncor Electric Delivery (Oncor) are embarking on a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) pilot project to explore the feasibility of transferring energy from BEVs’ batteries back to the grid. Toyota and Oncor want to better understand the interconnectivity between BEVs and utilities. The project will start testing at Oncor’s res... » read more

IC Stresses Affect Reliability At Advanced Nodes


Thermal-induced stress is now one of the leading causes of transistor failures, and it is becoming a top focus for chipmakers as more and different kinds of chips and materials are packaged together for safety- and mission-critical applications. The causes of stress are numerous. In heterogeneous packages, it can stem from multiple components composed of different materials. “These materia... » read more

Don’t Let Your ML Accelerator Vendor Tell You The ‘F-Word’


Machine learning (ML) inference in devices is all the rage. Nearly every new system on chip (SoC) design start for mobile phones, tablets, smart security cameras, automotive applications, wireless systems, and more has a requirement for a hefty amount of ML capability on-chip. That has silicon design teams scrambling to find ML processing power to add to the existing menu of processing engines ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →