Experts At The Table: The Internet Of Everything


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down to discuss the Internet of Things with Jack Guedj, president and CEO of Tensilica; John Heinlein, vice president of marketing for the physical IP division of ARM; Kamran Izadi, director of sourcing and supplier management at Cisco; and Oleg Logvinov, director of market development for STMicroelectronics’ Industrial and Power Conversion Division. Wh... » read more

Continuous, Connected And Concurrent Verification


By Ed Sperling It’s a wonder that any electronic system works as intended, or that it continues to work months or years after it is sold. The reason: SoCs have become so complex that no verification coverage model is sufficient anymore, no methodology covers every aspect of verification, and no single tool or even collection of tools can catch every bug or prevent them from being there in th... » read more

There Can Be Only One


By Cary Chin The tagline of the 1986 fantasy film “Highlander” implies that, at least in some instances, we eventually will arrive at a single, best solution for our problems. In the case of low-power design, the most obvious application of the phrase is in the standardization of low power intent formats, where the Unified Power Format (UPF) and the Common Power Format (CPF) have been lock... » read more

MEMS Goes Mainstream


By Cheryl Coupé Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are well known for enabling innovative capabilities for devices that range from vehicles and gaming to smartphones and tablets—and increasingly in personal health and fitness, security, and environmental applications. As stacked die become more popular, they also will become part of the integration challenge that chipmakers will wrestle... » read more

Open IP Development Tools


By Pascal Chauvet How much time have you wasted trying to understand software tools by deciphering the logic of their creator? I always find it very frustrating to be limited by features and tool capabilities that do not do exactly what I want, or which do not work at all with my other applications. We are engineers! We can learn and adapt, but we often want to be able to extend and improve th... » read more

Experts At The Table: Stacked Die Reality Check


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Sunil Patel, principal member of the technical staff for package technology at GlobalFoundries; Steve Pateras, product marketing director at Mentor Graphics; Steve Smith, senior director of platform marketing at Synopsys; Thorsten Matthias, business development director at EVGroup; and Manish Ranjan, vice president of market... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Future Of SystemC


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design moderated a discussion about the future of SystemC with Thomas Alsop, corporate design solution expert at Intel; Ambar Sarkar, chief verification technologist at Paradigm Works; Mike Meredith, vice president of technical marketing at Forte Design Systems; David Black, certified training instructor at Doulos. Here are some of the key outtakes of that discussio... » read more

The Next Frontiers


One of the interesting things about technology is that, at least from the outside, it’s hard to tell what’s actually changing. That’s not true on the inside, of course, where radical shifts are under way. The next big push in smart phones will be much greater intelligence. In the iPhone, Siri was just the tip of the iceberg. Future versions are likely to be much more interesting. Add ... » read more

Standards: Too Many or Not Enough?


Many of you are familiar with the Betamax versus VHS format wars in the late 1980s. If you’re not old enough to remember that one, you’ll remember HD DVD versus Blu-ray. In each of these cases, there was a clear winner. Semiconductor design has these format wars, too. The problem is that there is rarely a clear winner and worse, sometimes we miss the standard altogether. There are tw... » read more

Low Power: Coming To A CE Device Near You


By Pallab Chatterjee Low power and connectivity are the two pervasive design constraints for chips and systems being designed today, and they are showing up in devices that have not had architectural changes in decades. Some of the changes are customer-driven, some are consortia-driven, and international cooperation is making some of the regulatory-driven. The regulatory side is moving slow... » read more

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