Blog Review: Feb. 11


Ansys' Bill Vandermark flags the top five engineering articles of the week. Check out the one about the latest attempt at cold fusion, which left researchers hiding behind a blast shield. The solar-powered car named Stella drove away with the prestigious "Best Technology Achievement" award at the 8th annual Crunchies Awards this week. NXP's Maurice Geraets sounds like a proud parent – with... » read more

Optimizing Emulator Utilization


Russ Klein describes how Codelink, a Mentor Graphics trace-based debug tool, gives software developers a traditional software debug view from a unique processor trace, enabling them to increase emulator utilization and enjoy a more productive debug experience. Codelink allows for software debug earlier in the design cycle, as it makes it possible to use the emulator without having debug circuit... » read more

An Update On The IEEE 1801-2013 Unified Power Format Standard


It’s been almost six years since the first IEEE 1801 standard was officially published in March of 2009, but the standard can trace its roots back to years before that date. On May 30, 2013 the IEEE released a press announcement for the most recent version of the standard, IEEE 1801-2013 (a.k.a. UPF 2.1). This brought forward a standard for the industry that is finally backed by all of the ma... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Mergers & Acquistions Silicon Labs acquired Bluegiga Technologies Oy, providers of short-range wireless connectivity solutions and software for the IoT based in Espoo, Finland. Intel signed a definitive agreement to acquire Lantiq, a supplier of broadband access and home networking technologies based in Munich, Germany. Tools Mentor Graphics announced the addition of Automotive ... » read more

Week 35: Automotive At DAC


With my adopted hometown preparing for the Portland Auto Show, I thought it an opportune time to revisit automotive at DAC. Scanning the news releases, it seems that here in Portland the focus will be on things like horsepower, handling and, of course, design — the usual fare for an auto show. In contrast at DAC, we’ll be talking about the rapid increase in content and complexity that has m... » read more

FD-SOI Meets The IoT


Silicon-on-insulator manufacturing technology has been discussed for many years. IBM has used the partially depleted variation of SOI in its server products, but the fully depleted version has yet to find widespread adoption outside of mil/aero and automotive markets. That may change soon as applications in the Internet of Things ramp, given the requirements for ultra low power and low cost.... » read more

Round-Trip Engineering Key To AUTOSAR-based Development


This paper discusses how round-trip engineering can be used as an iterative development process and describes interoperability between tools from Mentor and MathWorks. Model-based design has become an important component in vehicle manufacturer and supplier development processes. Electronic control units are complex in terms of functionality, connectivity, and variants; therefore automotive ... » read more

Signal Integrity Issues


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss signal integrity with Rob Aitken, research fellow at [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"]; PV Srinivas, senior director of engineering for the Place & Route Division of [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; and Bernard Murphy, chief technology officer at [getentity id="22026" e_name="Atrenta"]. What follows are excerpts of that conver... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 4


After the Super Bowl, Ansys' Thierry Marchal looks at making football safer through virtual prototyping. Sports concussions are a serious danger for athletes from youths to professionals, and modeling head and brain impacts may lead not only to safer football helmets but a better understanding of how to lower the chance of brain injuries in sports. Synopsys' Ray Varghese continues his series... » read more

Back To The Future


The push to the next process node typically has meant that designs get simpler at existing and older nodes because the process technology is more mature and there have been so many chips developed at those nodes—many billions of them—that every possible corner case has been encountered hundreds, if not thousands, of times. That all makes sense in theory, but several key things have chang... » read more

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