tag: Tensilica

Experts vs. Expertise
By Ed Sperling - 08 Mar, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The trend in IC design—particularly for large, complex SoCs—is specialization among engineers. There are specialists for layout, for verification, for DFM, for test, and for software, among other things. And there are experts who have a smattering of many of the pieces and can oversee the integration and testing. Power is different. Because power affects every part of a d... » read more

Different Tradeoffs
By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The push to “smaller, faster and cheaper” hasn’t changed since ICs were first introduced, but the context for those requirements is beginning to shift—with enormous consequences. What was once done on multiple chips continue to migrate to a single chip or package because of cost, but in some cases the decisions about goes where go well beyond an individual device to i... » read more

Different Tradeoffs
By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The push to “smaller, faster and cheaper” hasn’t changed since ICs were first introduced, but the context for those requirements is beginning to shift—with enormous consequences. What was once done on multiple chips continue to migrate to a single chip or package because of cost, but in some cases the decisions about goes where go well beyond an individual device to i... » read more

Step Away From the Spreadsheet
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Engineers today spend more than a quarter of their time trying to meet power specifications. A survey of more than 700 engineers by Calypto illustrates just how important and time-consuming power management is today for engineering teams. As consumer devices grow ever more complex, the need to deal with, analyze and optimize power at not just the RTL but at the sys... » read more

Processor Subject To Change
By Ed Sperling - 09 Feb, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler With power complexity driving sophisticated management techniques, SoC design engineering teams are turning to a new class of customizable processor architectures from ARM, CEVA, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Tensilica and others to take advantage of the best in power saving techniques. While these new architectures are novel approaches, the concepts are not especially new,... » read more

Experts At The Table: Making Software More Energy-Efficient
By Ed Sperling - 27 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss software and power with Adam Kaiser, Nucleus RTOS architect at Mentor Graphics; Pete Hardee, marketing director at Cadence; Chris Rowen, CTO of Tensilica; Vic Kulkarni, senior vice president and general manager of Apache Design, and Bill Neifert, CTO of Carbon Design Systems. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPE: How m... » read more

Experts At The Table: Making Software More Energy-Efficient
By Ed Sperling - 20 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down to discuss software and power with Adam Kaiser, Nucleus RTOS architect at Mentor Graphics; Pete Hardee, marketing director at Cadence; Chris Rowen, CTO of Tensilica; Vic Kulkarni, senior vice president and general manager of Apache Design, and Bill Neifert, CTO of Carbon Design Systems. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPE: How d... » read more

When Worlds Collide: Saving Power In Communications Applications
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler The interplay of hardware and software is a given in every device that contains a semiconductor chip, but is typically felt more acutely in communications applications given the extremely close dependencies for everything power-related. Managing power in these situations just gets more challenging as consumers demand more and better applications on their tablets, smar... » read more

The Next Big Challenge
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Software is the next big target in the quest to make electronics more energy efficient, but it’s proving a far bigger challenge than most systems architects originally believed it would be. There are several very large big problems to deal with in software. Writing efficient code for small processors isn’t one of them. In fact, the proliferation of small processors across... » read more

Rethinking Good Enough
By Ed Sperling - 12 Jan, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Power has been elevated from an afterthought to one of the top considerations and tradeoffs in SoC design, edging out performance and area in many cases and in some cases even cost and features. Tradeoffs in design always change, depending upon what the most pressing concern is among consumers at any time. For decades, performance was always the top of anyone’s list, follow... » read more

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