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There has been a lot of huffing and puffing lately about 64-bit cores making it into the Apple A7 and other mobile SoCs, and we could probably dedicate a post to that discussion. However, there are a couple other wrinkles to the Apple A7 that should be getting a lot more attention.
There are two primary causes of user frustration in multimedia… Read More
The Internet of Things is on every technology mind these days, but what does it mean for the EDA community? Dennis Brophy of Mentor Graphics says the billions of things we are hearing about will not happen unless we find a way to build a lot more things, efficient things, and connected things. He has more thoughts in our recent interview.… Read More
One of the present ironies of the Internet of Things is as it seeks to connect every device on the planet, we are still designing those things with largely unconnected EDA tools. We may share libraries and source files on a server somewhere, but that is just the beginning of connection.
It is not surprising that synthesis tools from… Read More
Now that we’ve looked at the basics, we wrap up this three-part series exploring PVRTC texture compression. We’ll take a brief look at PVRTC2, the latest version of the technology, and then explore the issues behind visual quality from several different angles.
PVRTC2 is supported on the newest Series5XT or Series6 GPU cores from… Read More
Speaking from experience, it is very difficult to get an OEM customer to talk about how they actually use standards and vendor products. A new white paper co-authored by Broadcom lends insight into how a variety of technologies combine in a flow from IP block simulation verification with assertions to complete SoC emulation with… Read More
70% of today’s ASIC and SoC designs are being prototyped on FPGAs. Everybody knows that. But, did you know that automating the process of converting what could be thousands of ASIC “golden” files into FPGA-friendly versions can mean big savings in a large design?… Read More
In one of my favorite movies, Brad Pitt utters the only question that matters in baseball or technology management in the face of uncertainty: “Okay, good. What’s the problem?” Not surprisingly in that scene, as the question circles the table of experts used to doing things the old way, not a single one can answer it correctly in the… Read More
Recently, one of those very restrained press releases – in this case, Mentor Graphics and Imagination Technologiesextending their partnership for MIPS software support– crossed my desk with about 10% of the story. The 90% of this story I want to focus on is why Mentor is putting energy into this partnership… Read More
In the first post of this series, we named the popular methods for texture compression in OpenGL ES, particularly Imagination Technologies PVRTC on all Apple and many Android mobile devices. Now, let’s explore what texture compression involves, what PVRTC does, and how it differs from other approaches.… Read More
Let’s start with the bottom line: in 14nm processes, errors which have typically been little more than noise with respect to photomask critical dimension (CD) control targets at larger process nodes are about to become very significant, even out of control if not accounted for.… Read More
Solving the EDA tool fragmentation crisis