Designing SoCs For Hybrids


Hybrid vehicle sales are growing, driven by a global concern for lower vehicle emissions and consumer demand for better economy. This has set off a rush by semiconductor companies to provide key components for those vehicles because they are much more reliant on electronics than regular gasoline-powered vehicles. But the changeover is not as straightforward as it might sound. Hybrid vehicles... » read more

Why Build New Silicon?


You can’t turn around these days without hearing talk of our increasingly connected lives, tethered by the Internet of Everything (IoE), and cloud this, cloud that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking this next big thing because on many levels it is inspiring creativity, as all big things do. And the ramifications are still getting worked out as far as the impact on chip design, and t... » read more

Processor Use Models Evolving


Application-specific processing is a very broad category. It includes processors that are tuned for a specific application domain such as vision processing or software-defined radio for high-end wireless, or voice trigger in IoT devices. This category also includes narrowly focused processors optimized for a specific [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"], with a specific application within the chip. An... » read more

Designing For Security


Some level of security is required in SoC today, whether it is in hardware, software or — most commonly — both. Of course, there is a price to pay from a power and performance perspective, but thankfully just a small one in most cases. The explosion of consumer devices has driven the need for increased security features in smart cards, smart phones, personal computers, home networks, and... » read more

Automation Can’t Replace Human Intervention


We work in a dynamic industry where the focus is on making it easier to design and verify semiconductor chips by automating tasks for the design engineer. There is so much emphasis on this that I wonder if it is easy to forget the value of that designer’s experience. No matter how automated a process gets, there is always the fundamental assumption that the engineer knows what is happening be... » read more

A Balancing Act


By Ann Steffora Mutschler If you stay current on data center trends, you are well-versed on the fact that Intel reported last June energy proportionality has effectively doubled server efficiency and workload scaling beyond what Moore’s Law predicted. What does this have to do with power management of SoCs? Cary Chin, director of marketing for low-power solutions at Synopsys, said tha... » read more

Power Impacts On Advanced Node IP


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the move to the 28nm or 20nm process nodes, SoC engineering teams are seeing a significant amount of variations due to manufacturability. To reflect how a design element will be printed on the wafer, foundries offer many libraries with multiple corners for different voltages, timing and temperature, among other things. “At 28nm what we are seeing is a l... » read more

Newer posts →