Blog Review: Oct. 4


Synopsys' Prishkrit Abrol digs into how USB Type-C Alternate Mode allows MHL, DisplayPort, HDMI, and Thunderbolt over cable. Mentor's Paul Morrison dives into how hardware emulation can help verify the complexities of new storage devices. Cadence's Madhavi Rao listens in as Somshubhro Pal Choudhury of Bharat Innovations describes the IoT stack, hype cycle, and why it's happening now. R... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Imagination will sell its MIPS business to Tallwood, a California-based venture capital firm, for $65m in cash. The sale is expected to close in October. The rest of Imagination is slated to be sold to Canyon Bridge for £550 million in cash (~$740 million), a deal dependent on the MIPS sale. The Chinese-backed investment firm has featured recently in the news for its attempted purchas... » read more

Prototyping Building Blocks


Lego has existed for 85 years. The company was founded August 10, 1932, and after all these years, the concept of building structures big and small still hasn’t lost any of its charm. For my children, now 10 and 12, it is probably the most played with toy throughout their childhood. As with any new purchase, they initially and carefully build the specific design for the instructions included ... » read more

A Simple Way To Debug IIP-Based Designs And SoCs


Design problems that appear in the late phases of the development cycle can be extremely difficult to track down and debug, thus putting project schedules at risk. This whitepaper presents the concept of debugging with “real time simulation data” using Verdi Transaction Debug Platform (protocol analyzer, waveform viewer, source code browser) and show its benefits by taking a few generic USB... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 27


Synopsys' Mukul Dawar highlights the biggest changes coming to the PCIe 4.0 specification, plus a peek at what's new in PCIe 5.0. Cadence's Paul McLellan considers why EDA startups are less common than they used to be. Mentor's David Abercrombie and Alex Pearson discuss new requirements for detecting double patterning errors at advanced nodes. Rambus' Aharon Etengoff reports that secur... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A Synopsys acquired materials modeling company QuantumWise. QuantumWise tools focus on atomic-scale modeling of nanostructures using quantum-mechanical computational methods, classical potentials, and electrostatic models. Based in Denmark, the company was started in 2008 when it acquired the assets of Atomistix. The technology will be integrated with Synopsys' Sentaurus TCAD. Terms of t... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Finance Santa Monica, Calif.-based Sixgill reports raising $27.9 million in its Series B round of private financing, led by DRW Venture Capital. Mobile Financial Partners participated in the round. The startup last year raised $6 million in its Series A funding, also led by DRW. The company offers the Sixgill Sense sensor data services platform, addressing applications in the Internet of Thing... » read more

Blog Review: Sept. 20


Mentor's Jeff Miller warns that MEMS accelerometers are vulnerable to takeover using specially constructed sound waves, as demonstrated in a new paper. Synopsys' Pooja Gupta and Srinivas Vijayaragavan explain some major technology updates in SAS 24G with a look at Binary primitives, Extended Binary primitives and primitive parameters. Cadence's Paul McLellan shares highlights from TSMC's ... » read more

Managing Peak Power


Peak power is becoming a serious design constraint across chips and entire electronic systems as more functionality is added into end devices and the compute and switching infrastructure needed to support them. The issues are a direct result of growing complexity in designs, fixed or shrinking power budgets, and the need to process more data more quickly. In mobile devices, the addition of m... » read more

Light In A Package


Silicon photonics is gaining significant traction inside the data center, but creating a simpler method of packaging the laser with other circuitry remains a stumbling block for cutting costs and using this technology across a wider swath of applications. Progress does appear to be on the horizon, even though exact time frames remain unclear. The advantages of light in communications are wel... » read more

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