tag: Tensilica

Widening The Channels
By Ed Sperling - 17 Mar, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Wide I/O—both as a specific memory standard and as a generic approach for on-chip networking—has been looked at for the past couple of chip generations as a way of improving SoC performance. Increasingly, it also is being used as a key strategy for reducing energy consumption. Wide I/O refers to a number of different approaches in on-chip networking, ranging from through-... » read more

The True Test Of IP Reuse
By Ed Sperling - 17 Mar, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Fewer and fewer systems and semiconductor companies are designing brand new processors from scratch. Instead, they leverage as much IP as possible in their designs, investing selectivity in areas where they can add significant value. The challenges are varied from low-power issues to process technology migrations. Generally, IP consumers are doing two levels of IP-... » read more

Design For Configurability
By Ann Mutschler - 17 Mar, 2011 - Comments: 0

I admit it was a bit of a surprise to me to hear from a leading IP provider of the missteps that still befall design teams today as they seek to reuse IP, but it’s a little like rubbernecking. How do you not look? According to Grant Martin, chief scientist at Tensilica, “The biggest thing that people still don’t think about at the beginning of designing some new function is designing i... » read more

The Quest To Better Define Applications
By Ed Sperling - 27 Jan, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling For nearly five decades, just being able to get software to run on hardware and communicate with other systems was considered a feat of engineering. But with that part of the technology solved well enough, the next big challenge is to make sure that applications can run as efficiently as possible to maximize performance, minimize power consumption and limit the area required to ... » read more

The Quest To Better Define Applications
By Ed Sperling - 27 Jan, 2011 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling For nearly five decades, just being able to get software to run on hardware and communicate with other systems was considered a feat of engineering. But with that part of the technology solved well enough, the next big challenge is to make sure that applications can run as efficiently as possible to maximize performance, minimize power consumption and limit the area required to ... » read more

Version Control Nightmares
By Ed Sperling - 16 Dec, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The rampant re-use of IP and the growing reliance on software to smooth over glitches is creating a nightmare in version control of everything from IP blocks to EDA tools. Version control has always been a problem in SoC design, of course. Tools have to be in sync with engineering teams that are spread across multiple continents and working on different pieces of the design e... » read more

IP Integration Creates Challenges For Power
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Managing power when integrating IP is becoming a critical issue at advanced process nodes—and the problem is getting worse. For starters, static power leakage that occurs when the transistors are “off” gets worse at each node. On top of that, multiple states to minimize dynamic power leakage have pushed complexity even further. Throw in third-party IP from m... » read more

Making IP Tradeoffs For Power
By Ed Sperling - 13 May, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Power may be expensive, but just turning off sections of a chip, lowering the voltage or using low-power manufacturing processes have their own costs. Whether using power, or managing it, there is a price. As Brani Buric, executive vice president at Virage Logic says, “Power is not free.” But fortunately, other things in a design can be traded off in order to a... » read more

The Long And Painful Path To Power Optimization
By Ed Sperling - 11 Mar, 2010 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Think about any mobile Internet device today. Batteries typically last all day, applications shut down with ease, and the number of things it can do has reached the point where many people typically carry one device on the road rather than multiple devices they used to lug around several years ago. Perhaps even more astounding is the price drop on these devices. A basic cell ... » read more

ESL: Reality, Or A Pigment Of Your Fig Neuton?
By Various Writers - 31 Jul, 2009 - Comments: 0

By Clive "Max" Maxfield One of the questions I am often asked is: "Who's really using ESL tools such as modeling and are there any hiccups in the flow?" Another common question is: "What actually is ESL?" Perhaps we should address the latter question first. To some folks, ESL (electronic system level) means designing at a very high level of abstraction prior to making any hardware-softwar... » read more

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