Five Important Changes That Will Affect Power


By Ed Sperling So far most of the energy savings in SoCs have been achieved using two main approaches—turning off most of the chip most of the time, and changing the materials used to insulate against current leakage. Over the next few years, changes to designs will be more radical, encompass more pieces of a bigger system, and they will be orders of magnitude more effective. From a marke... » read more

Energy Vs. Power


By Ann Steffora Mutschler In the quest to optimize an SoC for both power and energy efficiency many variables come into play. Target application, use cases, processor choice and amount of memory among other specifications all figure into the optimization equation. As discussed in Part 1 of this series, energy and power are different entities and must be understood distinctly from each other... » read more

Innovation At The Core


By Barry Pangrle A number of next-generation ARM-based multi-core systems are starting to show up in the press. Nvidia has released information on its upcoming Tegra 3 (also known as “Kal El”). At last week’s ARM Techcon in Santa Clara, ARM gave several presentations around its Cortex-A7 (Kingfisher) and Cortex-A15 (Eagle) architectures and collectively about its big.LITTLE strategy. Qua... » read more

More EMI Mitigation


With electromagnetic interference a major design challenge today in any product that sends or receives a signal, determining how to lessen the impact of this phenomenon was addressed to a large extent in my article, “EMI Cuts a Wide Swath,” but there are a few additional techniques that are important to highlight. Erick Olsen, marketing director at NXP explained that higher performance c... » read more

The Next SoCs


By Ed Sperling The number of changes that will hit the IC market over the next few years is almost staggering by any standard—past or present. In addition to the relentless pressure of Moore’s Law, there will be new materials, new structures, and new models for developing and packaging chips. System-Level Design asked executives from across the SoC ecosystem what will change, what’s d... » read more

VIP: Behind The Velvet Rope


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Some years ago, as engineering teams began to incorporate more protocols into designs and as those protocols grew in sophistication and complexity in order to deliver additional performance, the verification task grew concurrently. At the same time, the design IP market was growing as complexity drove re-use of components, along with verification components—most com... » read more

Collaboration Grows


By Ed Sperling A series of recent announcements by the Big Three EDA vendors and their well-known partners from across the disaggregated SoC ecosystem is lending new credence to the impact of collaboration. While IDMs such as Apple, Intel, Samsung and IBM continue to blaze their own trail, developing in-house tools, methodologies, processes and chips, fabless companies working with foundrie... » read more

Revelations From Italy


By Jon McDonald I am just back from vacation. My wife and I spent two weeks in Italy. While there we toured the Tuscan countryside, Florence and Rome. We had a rental car for the time in Tuscany. In Rome we didn’t keep the car. Watching the different types of cars and the way they were driven gave me a good analogy for an issue I’ve had a number of discussions on. As people think about ... » read more

The Genealogy of DFM


By David Abercrombie Family histories are all the rage these days. With the advent of online databases, what was once a difficult and expensive task is now accessible to anyone with Internet access. Not only can you investigate census data, immigration records, and military service records with ease, but some sites also allow you to access information compiled by other site members. All of a... » read more

Redefining Systems Around Power


By Ed Sperling Engineers have been talking about system-level power budgets since Moore’s Law reached 65nm, but as power becomes a critical element of any design with or without a plug the definition of what constitutes a system is changing. While most SoC engineers think of the system as an IC, power increasingly is playing a significant role in the subsystem, and even in the larger syst... » read more

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