Blog Review: July 10


Synopsys' Eric Huang takes a look at how backward compatibility with USB 2.0 is provided when the IO voltages of new nodes can't support 3.3V signaling and how eUSB2 can boost the signal and provide support for external or legacy peripherals. In a video, Mentor Colin Walls explains endianness in embedded systems with a look at what it is, when it matters, and how to accommodate it in code. ... » read more

Blog Review: July 3


Cadence's Paul McLellan digs into 5G with a two-part post explaining the basics of the technology, what makes it so different from 4G, and the challenges ahead including the limitations of mmWave. Synopsys' Vikramjeet Bamel and Pankaj Sharma note the features that make GDDR6 a dominant memory in the high performance segment and allowing it to expand beyond graphics to automotive, AI, and AR/... » read more

Understanding The Importance Of Silicon Security


Vulnerabilities like Meltdown, Spectre and Foreshadow are understandably considered quite serious by the semiconductor industry. This is because they can be exploited by a determined attacker to access sensitive data that should be securely locked down but isn’t. We can think about a cloud-based server running multiple applications that process and store sensitive data. Vulnerabilities lik... » read more

Machine Learning Inferencing Moves To Mobile Devices


It may sound retro for a developer with access to hyperscale data centers to discuss apps that can be measured in kilobytes, but the emphasis increasingly is on small, highly capable devices. In fact, Google staff research engineer Pete Warden points to a new app that uses less than 100 kilobytes for RAM and storage, creates an inference model smaller than 20KB, and which is capable of proce... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


VESA published the DisplayPort 2.0 standard, which allows for a max payload of 77.37 Gbps, a 3X increase in data bandwidth performance compared to DisplayPort 1.4a. The latest release also includes capabilities to address beyond 8K resolutions, higher refresh rates and HDR support at higher resolutions, multiple display configurations, and support for 4K-and-beyond VR resolutions. It is backwar... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Products/Services Visa agreed to acquire the token and electronic ticketing business of Rambus for $75 million in cash. The business involved is part of the Smart Card Software subsidiary of Rambus. It includes the former Bell ID mobile-payment businesses and the Ecebs smart-ticketing systems for transit providers. Meanwhile, Rambus expanded its CryptoManager Root of Trust product line. “Sec... » read more

Blog Review: June 26


Arm's Krish Nathella and Dam Sunwoo dig into research to make a practical implementation of a temporal data prefetcher that overcomes the huge on- and off-chip storage and traffic overheads usually associated with them. Cadence's Paul McLellan notes that while concerns about uncover bias in computer vision algorithms usually focus on people, a team at Facebook found that object recognition t... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


ON Semiconductor completed its $946 million acquisition of Quantenna Communications, a San Jose-based company that specializes in Wi-Fi chips and software. Aldec introduced automatic UVM register generation to its Riviera-PRO verification platform. Riviera-PRO can now accept a CSV file or IP-XACT register description as an input and, working at the Register Abstraction Layer (RAL) of UVM, ou... » read more

Wrestling With High-Speed SerDes


SerDes has emerged as the primary solution in chips where there is a need for fast data movement and limited I/O, but this technology is becoming significantly more challenging to work with as speeds continue to rise to offset the massive increase in data. A Serializer/Deserializer is used to convert parallel data into serial data, allowing designers to speed up data communication without h... » read more

Blog Review: June 19


Mentor's Rebecca Lord digs into signal integrity complications and why today's high frequency signals make it important to understand the physics of transmission lines. Cadence's Meera Collier points to the need to recognize diversity and nuance when compiling AI training datasets and avoid the oversimplification that can lead to bias. Synopsys' Deepak Nagaria checks out the new features ... » read more

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