Experts At The Table: Timing Constraints


By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss timing constraints with ARM Fellow David Flynn; Robert Hoogenstryd, director of marketing for design analysis and signoff at Synopsys; Michael Carrell, product marketing for front end design at Cadence; Ron Craig, senior marketing manager at Atrenta; and Himanshu Bhatnagar, executive director of VLSI design at Mindspeed Technologies. Wha... » read more

Redefining Performance In Mobile Devices


By Ann Steffora Mutschler While mobile product trends can be reliably unpredictable, devices are definitely moving towards supporting more software-based browsers, plug-ins for browsers, and downloaded codecs to go to browsers. This results in coming up with a best guess for performance targets. Throw power tradeoffs into the mix and things really start to get interesting. In terms of defin... » read more

Making Too Much Noise


By Ed Sperling For the better part of a decade talk about signal integrity in mixed-signal designs has been noticeably absent. That’s about to change. Prior to the adoption of a 130nm process, many semiconductor companies actually went on record saying they were considering abandoning plans to ever put analog and digital on the same chip because the noise on digital would interrupt signal... » read more

Experts At The Table: Timing Constraints


Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss timing constraints with ARM Fellow David Flynn; Robert Hoogenstryd, director of marketing for design analysis and signoff at Synopsys; Michael Carrell, product marketing for front end design at Cadence; Ron Craig, senior marketing manager at Atrenta; and Himanshu Bhatnagar, executive director of VLSI design at Mindspeed Technologies. What follows are ex... » read more

Software Drives Design Requirements


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As product design evolves to contain more and more software, that software—including the applications that run on the device—is now starting to drive design and process requirements. This change is causing ripples throughout the semiconductor industry, driving evolutionary thinking about where to go next. OEMs have taken notice of a new dynamic and want to capt... » read more

Moving To Open-Source Software


By Ann Steffora Mutschler With the typical cost of software accounting for 40% to 60% of an SoC, semiconductor OEMs are under more pressure than ever to meet margins. As a result, they are drawing on their ecosystem partners to provide a more complete foundation including hardware, software, FPGA prototypes, verification IP and virtual models, as well as an increasing demand for open source so... » read more

What’s In The Package?


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The growing market for smart mobile devices and high-performance processors requiring more than 2GHz of processing power is driving IP providers to do even more work to prepare their IP offerings for customers. This theme was reflected at last week’s GlobalFoundries Global Technology Conference when the company’s senior VP of technology and R&D Gregg Bartle... » read more

Estimating Power From Mobile Device Apps


By Ann Steffora Mutschler How do software application developers – even the ones sitting at home on their living room sofas with laptops – measure the power consumption of their application on the target device? This is a big problem today (something that is painfully obvious to owners of iPhones or Blackberries), and it will only get bigger. Software engineers may think it is not their... » read more

The Growing Software Challenge: From Stacks To SMP


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Building a system now includes software, but defining the software stack is a mounting challenge for engineers. What used to be almost exclusively drivers now includes RTOSes and OSes, executable files, middleware, firmware, IP, embedded software and applications. With millions of different embedded products, all with different sets of software, it comes down to pr... » read more

Defining Power Intent


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Designing power-sensitive SoCs has never been more challenging given the tremendous demand for power efficiency in applications ranging from smart phones to servers inside data centers. That makes describing the power control architecture of a chip through power intent essential. Specifically, explained Will Ruby, senior director of product engineering and applicat... » read more

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