Brain-Inspired Computing


Approaching power/performance tradeoffs from an architectural perspective is essential given the complexities of today’s SoCs. And beyond some traditional techniques that I discussed in a recent article, Bernard Murphy, CTO at Atrenta mentioned that there is currently a lot of buzz about using non-Von Neumann architectures — especially for recognition functions (voice, image and text). ... » read more

Week 49: Are We There Yet?


When I was a little kid my parents would pack me and my sister into the car and drive to the Mediterranean for our summer camping vacation. It was quite a haul from our home on the west side of Germany near the border with Belgium to the south of France, and as is true of any long car trip, the last stretch was the hardest. After hours in the backseat, my sister and I would be craning our necks... » read more

Is The IoT Safe To Use?


By Ernest Worthman & Ed Sperling Data security has been a problem since well before the invention the computer, and it has been getting progressively more difficult to contain every year for the past eight decades. It was made much worse when computing was decentralized with the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, made worse again when networking was introduced into corporations by Novell'... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Embedded Mentor Graphics released a new version of their Nucleus RTOS with a focus on high-performance IoT and wearable applications. Updates include support for Dynamic Linking and Loading (DLL) capabilities in Cortex-M based cores; the ability for developers to reconfigure, update, and provision connected embedded devices that utilize cloud-based remote software services; and TI WiLink 8 m... » read more

Security Progress In Some Places, Not Others


Security is big business, and it's increasingly part of business done between big businesses in the semiconductor market. The deal that was announced this week between NXP and Qualcomm, adding a secure NFC module to the Snapdragon chip, is certainly good business. But what's really interesting about this arrangement is that it was done between two very prominent companies, which saw a potent... » read more

Get Ready For More Biometrics


Security involving scans of fingerprints, palms, faces, or some other variant has been common in movies for years, and many phones and computers now offer fingerprint scans instead of a password login. But as security risks rise with the rollout of the [getkc id="76" comment="Internet of Things"]/Internet of Everything, that technology will need to become much more pervasive and sophisticated. ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


After several delays due to a myriad of complex regulatory issues, Applied Materials’ proposed deal to buy Tokyo Electron Ltd. (TEL) has been scrapped. Now, Applied Materials and TEL are separately re-grouping, and are back to where they originally started as competitors in the fab tool market. Applied Materials held a conference call to explain the situation with TEL. Applied Materials... » read more

Problems Ahead For EDA


You may have discovered that the Semiconductor Engineering Knowledge Center (KC) provides various ways in which data can be viewed. One way is to see what events happened in a given year. During the 1990s, company activity in terms of new startups and acquisitions reached a peak, and in 1997 there were at least 29 startups that the KC contains and 25 companies acquired (let us know if there wer... » read more

What EDA’s Big 3 Think Now


In the past two months the CEOs of Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics delivered their annual high-level messages to their respective user groups. Semiconductor Engineering attended all of the speeches at these conferences, as it did in 2014 (see story here). From a high level, the big issues for CEOs last year were Moore's Law, the costs of design, the impact of low power, and business-... » read more

Pressure Builds To Revamp The Design Flow


Without [getkc id="7" kc_name="EDA"] there would be no [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] as we know it today, and without Moore's Law there would be a much more limited need for EDA. But after more than three decades of developing design flows packed with sophisticated tools to automate semiconductor design through verification, and thereby enable feature shrinks that are the basis of Moore... » read more

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