After Moore’s Law: More With Less


In the decades when Moore’s Law went unquestioned, the industry was able to migrate to the next smaller node and receive access to more devices that could be used for increased functionality and additional integration. While less significant transistor-level power savings have been seen from the more recent nodes, as leakage currents have increased, the additional levels of integration have b... » read more

Raising The Abstraction Of Power: Trends


Given that design requirements for today’s SoCs go well beyond performance and area, energy efficiency and its impact on system design plays a major role for many end applications ranging from wireless sensor networks to autonomous vehicles as well as emerging applications in the Internet of Things market segment, where cooling capability is limited and expensive. For these reasons, a comp... » read more

Supporting LP In New Process Nodes


Manufacturing process nodes and EDA tools are advancing all the time, but not always utilized at the same pace. And from a tools perspective, there are challenges to supporting low power in new process nodes while maintaining and improving the existing process nodes. One way design teams address this is by leveraging the most advanced software on the less-than-bleeding edge designs. To th... » read more

Using PCI Express L1 Sub-states To Minimize Power Consumption In Advanced Process Nodes


The major sources of Internet traffic are shifting from wired to wireless and mobile devices. With the growing regulatory requirements and increased consumer pressure for more power-efficient products, designers need to better understand and optimize the power consumption of battery-operated devices. Power consumption of a portable device widely varies based on the user’s behavior and appl... » read more

28nm FinFETs?


One star of the upcoming 14/16nm process node is the introduction of the finFET, a fundamentally new transistor that overcomes many of the limitations associated with planar transistors. While these devices are more complex to construct—and the physical extraction processes associated with them is more complex due to an increased number of resistances and capacitances—they are seen as a tra... » read more

Ultra Low-Power 9D Sensor Fusion Implementation


This paper presents a case study on computing the 3D orientation of a device by means of a 9D fusion algorithm. The focus is on optimizing the fusion algorithm for execution on the DesignWare Sensor IP Subsystem. Performance measurements show the benefits of using ARC Processor EXtension (APEX) accelerators, which improve both cycle count and energy consumption in comparison to other commercial... » read more

Blog Review: July 9


Cadence’s Richard Goering walks through a keynote speech from DAC, which was delivered by Imagination Technologies’ Peter McGuinness, about the evolving role of image processing and what it can do. There are lots of changes ahead in this space. Who’s financing the Internet of Things and what are they funding? ARM’s Brad Nemire takes a look at oort, a Bluetooth hub that looks like a ... » read more

Next Bonanza: Security Holes


Security threats—both real and potential—are beginning to reshape the semiconductor business. These threats are drawing venture capitalists back into the industry as they race for the next big opportunity. They are blurring the lines between software and hardware, as threats grow in complexity at every level of a device and its myriad and sometimes perpetual connections to the outside wo... » read more

DFM And Multipatterning


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss DFM at advanced nodes with Kuang-Kuo Lin, director of foundry design enablement at Samsung Electronics; Jongwook Kye, lithography modeling and architecture fellow at GlobalFoundries; David Abercrombie, advanced physical verification methodology program manager at Mentor Graphics; Ya-Chieh Lai, engineering director for DFM/CLS silicon signoff and ver... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools The Android Open Source Project for ARM’s v8-A architecture is now available as part of the Linaro 14.06 release. The release has been tested on 64-bit multicore processors. Research NXP conducted a secure credit card survey that showed Americans are more likely to pay cash following security breaches at large retail chains, with 69% in favor of secure credit cards to guard against... » read more

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