tag: software

How Software Utilizes Cores
By Ed Sperling - 04 Nov, 2010 - Comments: 2

By Ann Steffora Mutschler When writing software, how does the design engineer determine how much power it will draw on a particular targeted platform? While the question seems straightforward, the answer is not. The industry is just starting to develop the ability to get some data in that space, according to Cary Chin, director of technical marketing for Synopsys’ low-power solutions gr... » read more

User Perspective: Hardware-Software Co-Design
By Ed Sperling - 07 Oct, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With software teams today twice as large as hardware teams for any given complex SoC project, there is no doubt it is an ideal time to agree on the best way for these worlds to intersect. And even though the semiconductor industry has been actively discussing hardware-software co-design for at least a decade a mainstream solution has yet to be commercialized. Progr... » read more

Software Drives Design Requirements
By Ed Sperling - 23 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler As product design evolves to contain more and more software, that software—including the applications that run on the device—is now starting to drive design and process requirements. This change is causing ripples throughout the semiconductor industry, driving evolutionary thinking about where to go next. OEMs have taken notice of a new dynamic and want to capt... » read more

Estimating Power From Mobile Device Apps
By Ann Mutschler - 09 Sep, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler How do software application developers – even the ones sitting at home on their living room sofas with laptops – measure the power consumption of their application on the target device? This is a big problem today (something that is painfully obvious to owners of iPhones or Blackberries), and it will only get bigger. Software engineers may think it is not their... » read more

The Growing Software Challenge: From Stacks To SMP
By Ann Mutschler - 26 Aug, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Building a system now includes software, but defining the software stack is a mounting challenge for engineers. What used to be almost exclusively drivers now includes RTOSes and OSes, executable files, middleware, firmware, IP, embedded software and applications. With millions of different embedded products, all with different sets of software, it comes down to pr... » read more

The Upside Of Glitches
By Ed Sperling - 22 Jul, 2010 - Comments: 0

There has always been a struggle between the verification and marketing sides of any chip company. The solution in the past has simply been to hire lots more verification engineers on a contract basis prior to tapeout and to muscle through the debug process. Creating a more generic platform and differentiating it with software changes that equation, and that is raising lots of concern behind... » read more

Redefining ‘Good Enough’
By Ed Sperling - 24 Jun, 2010 - Comments: 0

The increasing amount of software content in devices and the ability to add fixes after tapeout is changing the definition of what’s considered a market-ready product. This is business as usual in the software world, where patches upon patches are considered routine. Service packs are a way of fixing problems when millions of lines of code interact with millions more lines of code in unan... » read more

Experts At The Table: Verification Nightmares
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down with Shabtay Matalon, ESL marketing manager in Mentor Graphics’ Design Creation Division; Bill Neifert, CTO at Carbon Design Systems; Terrill Moore, CEO of MCCI Corp., and Frank Schirrmeister, director of product marketing for system-level solutions at Synopsys. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPE: How important is a high-leve... » read more

New Math: 1+1=1?
By Ed Sperling - 07 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

From the standpoint of place and route, synthesis, and even some pieces of the hardware verification, the cost of chips even at advanced nodes hasn’t budged. It’s now possible to create a chip at 28nm with roughly the same budget as a 40nm chip, and inside many companies that’s what the hardware engineering manager sees. Look across the entire SoC design chain, however, and the picture... » read more

What Went Wrong At Toyota?
By Ed Sperling - 25 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

There’s been a lot of speculation about what caused Toyotas in general, and the Prius in particular, to suddenly accelerate. All across the electronics industry, this is big news because of the amount of electronics that now sits inside an automobile. The most advanced cars have complicated networks of processors, memory, logic, and basically everything that’s already built into the most... » read more

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