It’s Transition Time Again


By Ed Sperling After decades of shrinking features, developing new software on every level and engineering huge improvements in energy efficiency and performance, the semiconductor industry has reached a crossroads. To get to the next level will require massive improvements on all fronts, but not all consumers will be willing to pay for them. For example, if a battery lasts an entire day f... » read more

Embedded Power Management Challenges Grow


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Power management always has been, and will continue to be, a big issue with electronic devices. But when it comes to power management in embedded systems—controlling battery power in a smartphone, an industrial automation or automotive application, among a myriad of other options—the approaches come with different variables. For example, deeply embedded s... » read more

First Silicon At 14nm


By Ed Sperling The first 14nm test chips are beginning to roll out the door from foundries, and companies are beginning to trumpet their success. But before anyone pops the champagne corks, there are some caveats. First of all, what most people are billing as 14nm chips are actually mostly 20nm. They are readily willing to concede that point, settling on 16nm, but the reality is that it’s... » read more

All Things To All Customers


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Low-Power High-Performance Engineering recently spoke with Suresh Menon, VP of systems development at Lattice Semiconductor, about the challenges of directing the development of power-sensitive FPGAs from architectural decisions to identifying the target applications. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. LPHP: When you look at the products that Lattic... » read more

CES 2013: Signs Of Things To Come


By Cary Chin It’s always fun to see the latest gadgets introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show, held last week in Las Vegas. This year, two in particular stuck in my mind. First, in what is clearly still a fledgling industry (not necessarily for technology reasons), Audi demonstrated its self-driving car, with the added twist that you could “call” your car. It remotely started up, ma... » read more

Designing With FinFETs: The Opportunities And The Challenges


With the help of double-patterning and other advanced lithography techniques, CMOS technology continues to scale to 20-nanometer (nm) and beyond. Yet, because of their superior attributes, FinFETs are replacing planar CMOS technology as the device technology of choice at these advanced nodes. In particular, FinFETs demonstrate better results in the areas of performance, leakage and dynamic powe... » read more

What Happened To Statistical Static Timing Analysis?


About five years ago if you listened to the marketing messages in the EDA industry, you would have thought it would be impossible to produce chips without statistical static timing analysis (SSTA). Fast forward to now and the industry seems to have put this approach on the back burner. So what happened? “The idea was that if you modeled your design instead of using a corner-based approa... » read more

Adventures In Verification


By Ed Sperling Design complexity can be almost bit-mapped with verification complexity. There are so many things that need to be verified in a design these days that full coverage has become almost possible to guarantee. That has created a market for tools to help with the verification process—formal, functional, physical—and different methodologies for using those tools. But how to app... » read more

What’s Ahead For System-Level Design


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Architecting an SoC today is incredibly difficult. When you add in the number of available transistors, the manufacturing effects of smaller nodes, IP and software that must be integrated, among other things, the challenges just keep mounting. Depending on what market segment the SoC will be designed into has a huge impact, as well. “It is impossible to ove... » read more

Taking Stock Of Models


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The world of modeling in SoC design is multi-dimensional to say the least. One dimension contains the model creators and providers, while the other is comprised of the types of models that exist in the marketplace. “What we’re seeing today is that we have basically models coming from either IP providers—the people that are actually producing those cores ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →