Are We There Yet?


We’ve been talking in the industry for as long as I can remember about hardware and software co-design and I’m always curious to hear how that it progressing….or not. I posed this question to Jon McDonald, technical marketing engineer in Mentor Graphics’ design creation synthesis group who is constantly in touch with engineering teams. His take is that hardware and software teams are... » read more

Customer Perspective: STMicroelectronics


By Ed Sperling Philippe Magarshack, group vice president for technology R&D at STMicroelectronics, sat down with Low-Power Engineering to talk about some of the fundamental changes ahead in how SoCs are designed, built, how they perform and what steps can be taken to speed time to market. LPE: What do you see as the biggest changes ahead? Magarshack: One is the sheer size of the ecosy... » read more

Getting The Balance Right


Defining the power architecture for a low-power design means striking a balance between the high-level abstraction and measurements made typically at RTL and below, but today that is easier said than done. “The balance is that at the high level of abstraction, the design choices you make have a big effect over power, yet your ability to measure them is incomplete until you get much further... » read more

SoC Design In 5 Years


By Ed Sperling The semiconductor industry is used to looking at changes every couple of years, based upon the progression of Moore’s Law. But look out further, over the next five years when the most advanced process node is somewhere between 14nm and 16nm, and the job of designing and manufacturing an SoC will look very different. At the center of this change are three very significant tr... » read more

Playing Hardball With Software


By Frank Ferro Software is never-ending, or so the axiom goes. It shouldn’t take long to convince anyone that has used an electronic device of the truth of this statement. The PC environment is the most obvious (and obnoxious) example with daily application software updates, at the most inconvenient times, coupled with regularly scheduled updates for the OS. Even embedded devices like media ... » read more

The Tao Of Software


By Ed Sperling and Pallab Chatterjee As software teams continue to race past hardware teams in numbers of engineers, hours spent on designs and NRE budgets, companies are beginning to question whether there needs to be a fundamental shift in priorities and strategy. The problem is that it takes far too long to write and debug the software and to get it working on the hardware, even with vir... » read more

How Software Utilizes Cores


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 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 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 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

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