CEO Outlook On Chip Industry (Part 1)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Wally Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business; Simon Segars, CEO of Arm; Grant Pierce, CEO of Sonics; and Dean Drako, CEO of IC Manage. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. L-R: Dean Drako, Grant Pierce, Wally Rhines, Simon Segars. Photo: Paul Cohen/ESD Alliance SE: What are the big changes ahead, and where do you see th... » read more

Power Optimization Strategies Widen


An increasing amount of electronic content in new and existing markets is creating different and sometimes competing demands for power optimization. For the past decade, EDA has been driven by the mobile phone industry, where the emphasis is on better power analysis and optimization tools to reduce power consumption and extend battery life. While energy efficiency continues to improve, other... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 18


Cadence's Meera Collier provides an overview of five emerging technologies that could drive the semiconductor industry in the future, from carbon nanotubes to quantum computing. Mentor's Colin Walls reminds embedded software developers of a few common sense tips, including better readability with braces in C/C++ and monitoring stack overflow. Synopsys' Tim Mackey rounds up the last few we... » read more

IP And Power


[getkc id="108" kc_name="Power"] is quickly becoming a major differentiator for products, regardless of whether they are connected to a wall outlet or dependent on a battery. At the same time, increasing amounts of a chips content comes from third-party [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"]. So how do system designers ensure that the complete system has an optimal power profile, and what can they do to ... » read more

Energy Requirements And Challenges For IoT Autonomous Intelligence At The Edge


Recently, on a cold February night at San Jose State University, I attended the fourth episode of the talk series IR4: The Cognitive Era. IR4 talks focus on the fourth Industrial Revolution that is currently taking place and how cognitive science affects education, careers, and life. This latest part involved four esteemed experts on cloud and edge computing and the ramifications of energy effi... » read more

Could Liquid IP Lead To Better Chips? (Part 3)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the benefits that could come from making IP available as abstract blocks instead of RTL implementations with Mark Johnstone, technical director for Electronic Design Automation for [getentity id="22499" e_name="NXP"] Semiconductor; [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], CTO at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; Bryan Bowyer, director of ... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys finalized its acquisition of Black Duck Software, which provides software for managing and securing open source software in projects, adding to Synopsys' burgeoning software analysis and security business. The cash deal was approximately $547 million net of cash acquired. STMicroelectronics acquired Atollic, maker of the Eclipse-based TrueSTUDIO Integrated Development Envir... » read more

Could Liquid IP Lead To Better Chips?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the benefits that could come from making IP available as abstract blocks instead of RTL implementations with Mark Johnstone, technical director for Electronic Design Automation for [getentity id="22499" e_name="NXP"] Semiconductor; [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], CTO at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; Bryan Bowyer, director of ... » read more

Could Liquid IP Lead To Better Chips?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the benefits that could come from making IP available as abstract blocks instead of RTL implementations with Mark Johnstone, technical director for Electronic Design Automation for [getentity id="22499" e_name="NXP"] Semiconductor; [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], CTO at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; Bryan Bowyer, director of ... » read more

Move Data Or Process In Place? (Part 2)


Chip architectures, and even local system architectures, long have found that the best way to improve total system performance and power consumption is to move memory as close to processors as possible. This has led to cache architectures and memories that are tuned for those architectures, as discussed in part 1 of this article. But there are several tacit assumptions made in these architectur... » read more

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