Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Nvidia acquired Oski Technology. Oski provides formal verification methodologies and consulting services, and Nvidia said that the acquisition will allow it to increase its investment in formal verification strategies. Oski's Gurugram, India, design center will become Nvidia's fourth engineering office in the country. Based in San Jose, Calif., it was founded in 2005. Terms of the deal were not... » read more

11 Ways To Reduce AI Energy Consumption


As the machine-learning industry evolves, the focus has expanded from merely solving the problem to solving the problem better. “Better” often has meant accuracy or speed, but as data-center energy budgets explode and machine learning moves to the edge, energy consumption has taken its place alongside accuracy and speed as a critical issue. There are a number of approaches to neural netw... » read more

Battle Brewing Over Automotive Display Protocols


Displays are multiplying in new and future automobiles. That means a lot more display data moving around the vehicle and traveling some distance between sensor and processor. While existing protocols can handle some of the new duties, new protocols also are being developed specifically for this application. “Automotive displays are proliferating, increasing in numbers and in pixel densi... » read more

Spiking Neural Networks: Research Projects or Commercial Products?


Spiking neural networks (SNNs) often are touted as a way to get close to the power efficiency of the brain, but there is widespread confusion about what exactly that means. In fact, there is disagreement about how the brain actually works. Some SNN implementations are less brain-like than others. Depending on whom you talk to, SNNs are either a long way away or close to commercialization. Th... » read more

Memory Issues For AI Edge Chips


Several companies are developing or ramping up AI chips for systems on the network edge, but vendors face a variety of challenges around process nodes and memory choices that can vary greatly from one application to the next. The network edge involves a class of products ranging from cars and drones to security cameras, smart speakers and even enterprise servers. All of these applications in... » read more

Machine Learning Inferencing Moves To Mobile Devices


It may sound retro for a developer with access to hyperscale data centers to discuss apps that can be measured in kilobytes, but the emphasis increasingly is on small, highly capable devices. In fact, Google staff research engineer Pete Warden points to a new app that uses less than 100 kilobytes for RAM and storage, creates an inference model smaller than 20KB, and which is capable of proce... » read more

Machine Learning Drives High-Level Synthesis Boom


High-level synthesis (HLS) is experiencing a new wave of popularity, driven by its ability to handle machine-learning matrices and iterative design efforts. The obvious advantage of HLS is the boost in productivity designers get from working in C, C++ and other high-level languages rather than RTL. The ability to design a layout that should work, and then easily modify it to test other confi... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Smart-building technology is a factor in marketing new facilities to prospective tenants. The new Cambridge Crossing development in Cambridge, Mass., aspires to attract tech-oriented tenants much like nearby Kendall Square, this analysis notes. Philips has agreed to lease seven floors in Cambridge Crossing’s first office building, making that location its North American he... » read more

Next Wave Of Security For IIoT


A rush of new products and services promise to make the famously un-secured Industrial IoT (IIoT) substantially more secure in the near future. Although the semiconductor industry has been churning out a variety of security-related products and concepts, ranging from root of trust approaches to crypto processors and physically unclonable functions, most IIoT operations have been slow to adop... » read more

Issues In Designing 5G Beamforming Antennas


As 5G networking inches closer to reality, one of the more stubborn problems also will be one of the smallest. Several issues have yet to be cracked with beamforming and massive MIMO antennas, which will make millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum—a key ingredient in 5G networks—work on multiple devices and base-station locations. Millimeter wave is problematic yet promising. Between bands 30... » read more

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