Blog Review: March 29


In a video, Cadence's Megha Daga introduces how convolutional neural networks identify objects and the wide range of applications for the technology. Mentor's Ron Press proposes a way to take advantage of hierarchical DFT features, even if a design wasn't designed for it. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi shares highlights of the RAND Corporation's extensive report examining zero day vulnerabilitie... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Business Andes Technology went public this week on the Taiwan Stock Exchange with an initial stock listing of 40,611,915 shares at a price of NT$65.10 (USD $2.12) per share. The shares began trading March 14, 2017, under the TWSE ticker symbol “6533.TWO.” Andes plans to use the proceeds to expand the company's R&D effort, to fuel international expansion into the U.S. and Europe and t... » read more

Power Impacting Cost Of Chips


The increase in complexity of the power delivery network (PDN) is starting to outpace increases in functional complexity, adding to the already escalating costs of modern chips. With no signs of slowdown, designers have to ensure that overdesign and margining do not eat up all of the profit margin. The semiconductor industry is used to problems becoming harder at smaller geometries, but unti... » read more

The Ultimate Shift Left


Floorplanning is becoming much more difficult due to a combination of factors—increased complexity of the power delivery network, lengthening of clock trees, rising levels of communication, and greater connectedness of [getkc id="81" kc_name="SoC"]s coupled with highly constrained routing resources. The goal of floorplanning is to determine optimal placement of blocks on a die. But connect... » read more

Dealing With Unintended Behavior


Functional verification was already tough enough, but having to identify behaviors that were never defined or intended opens up the search space beyond what existing tools are capable of handling. However, while you may not be able to eliminate unintended behaviors, a design team is not helpless. There are several steps that can be taken to reduce the likelihood of these problems getting int... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A ARM made two acquisitions to add the new NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) low power wide area connectivity standard to its designs: Mistbase, founded in 2015 in Sweden, provides a complete NB-IoT physical layer implementation solution, while London-based NextG-Com, founded in 2008, offers a complete layer two and three software stack for NB-IoT. Tools Synopsys released the latest versio... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 22


Mentor's Brian Derrick digs into the state of the electric vehicle industry and whether established OEMs will be able to make the changes required to meet new consumer demands. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in on how to greatly improve the efficiency of machine learning, without using custom hardware, in a talk by Stanford's Kunle Olukotun. Synopsys' Robert Vamosi warns not to overlook ... » read more

New Memories And Architectures Ahead


Memory dominates many SoCs, and it is rare to hear that a design contains too much memory. However, memories consume a significant percentage of system power, and while this may not be a critical problem for many systems, it is a bigger issue for Internet of Things ([getkc id="76" kc_name="IoT"]) edge devices where total energy consumption is very important. Memory demands are changing in al... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


IP Rambus unveiled High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Gen2 PHY developed for GlobalFoundries' FX-14 ASIC platform. The PHY, targeted at networking and data center applications, is fully compliant with the JEDEC HBM2 standard and supports data rates up to 2000 Mbps per data pin, for a total bandwidth of 256 GB/s. Omnitek launched a number of new FPGA-based video IPs, including HDMI2.0 Tx and Rx, ... » read more

Uncovering Unintended Behavior


Very few companies ever had to worry about security until recently. Over the past couple of years, we have seen increasing evidence that our connected systems are vulnerable. The recent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which made many Internet sites unavailable, has focused attention on Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as digital video recorders and cameras that have Internet a... » read more

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