Exploring The Use Of Virtual Platforms At The Electronic System Level

By Cheryl Ajluni - 27 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Cheryl Ajluni System design is hard. That should not come as a surprise to anyone these days. With design geometries shrinking and device complexity on the rise, this fact is not likely to change anytime soon. One concept for easing that burden for system-level designers is the virtual platform. Granted, the concept itself is nothing new, but today it is being employed in ever more creativ... » read more

The Downturn’s Impact On Startups

By Ed Sperling - 05 Mar, 2009 - Comments: 0

The strong get stronger in a downturn for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the outset of the slump. First of all, contracts that are in place at the outset typically don’t get canceled—at least not at first, and frequently not at all. In the system-level design world, those contracts can last as long as 18 to 24 months. Even if the number of derivative chips is scaled back, ... » read more

NoC Your SoCs Off

By Ed Sperling - 19 Feb, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The network on a chip (NoC) approach is gaining ground as an essential part of a system on a chip (SoC), providing the same kind of time-to-market advantage that well-tested intellectual property blocks provide. This follows almost eight years of hype about NoCs potential with little to show for it. Times have changed and there appear to be two main drivers, one technological a... » read more

The Quest For Faster Data Throughput On A Chip

By Ed Sperling - 19 Feb, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling As with all network topologies, the general rule is the faster the better. Jack Browne, VP of sales and marketing at Sonics, said his customers are asking for higher-speed interconnects. “Right now we’re at 300MHz,” he said. “They want to more than double that in the very near future and eventually get to 1GHz.” Getting to that speed is no simple ... » read more

The Trouble With Multicore Software

By Ed Sperling - 12 Feb, 2009 - Comments: 0

David Patterson, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, presented his views to the Naval Postgraduate School about the prospects for multicore programming success. This video was excerpted from his presentation. [youtube vid=EDHXIH8DlLY] » read more

Making A Multicore System Work

By Ed Sperling - 29 Jan, 2009 - Comments: 0

If you think designing a single-core system is hard, designing multicore systems is multiple times harder. Connecting all the pieces together and making them work properly, if not together, is one of the hardest tasks design engineers and architects will ever face. System-Level Design tracked down some of the experts in this field and sat them down around a table to discuss what’s going... » read more

New Pain Points In System-Level Design

By Ed Sperling - 22 Jan, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling One of the strange things about downturns is they force companies to re-examine what they do and question what kind of value they bring to the market. This is particularly true in the semiconductor world, where the average selling prices for chips has been sliding for the better part of two decades. In the case of the chip industry, which is heavily cyclical, that leaves lo... » read more

One Design, Many Products

By Pallab Chatterjee - 22 Jan, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Pallab Chatterjee The tightening worldwide economy finally has forced the consumer products arena to adopt an aggressive single-SKU mentality for their products. This means companies are now making a single standard product that can be sold into multiple applications. This marks a radical shift in the way products are being designed, a direction that makes the design and development proces... » read more

Vectors of Change

By Ed Sperling - 03 Dec, 2008 - Comments: 0

Downturns have a way of changing things forever—sort of like the earthquake of 1812, which permanently re-routed the Mississippi River in three places. And while the common thinking is that things will go back to where they were before, they never do. For one thing, the trend isn’t just smaller, faster, cheaper. It’s also shorter development cycles. Incredibly complex chips now tak... » read more

Lead or Follow?

By Ed Sperling - 13 Nov, 2008 - Comments: 0

Like it or not, governments are going to be dictating energy policies in the very near future. The scenario will start unfolding at the data center, make its way down to the device level, and ultimately land at the system level. At the chip design level, the situation will be particularly bad. For one thing, communication from the top never makes its way all the way down the food chain w... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
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