The topic of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) conjures up images of usage on airplanes, tanks and cars. That’s because it was developed decades ago to help make product development and delivery more efficient for big expensive manufactured products. It worked well for its intended markets by combining and managing all the … Read More
Author: Tom Simon
Making PLM Actually Work for for IC Design
Neural Networks Poised to Make Big Changes in Our World
Probably the most interesting thing about Neural Networks is how they can be used for complex recognition tasks that we as people can easily perform but we might have a lot of trouble explaining how. One very good example of a problem that Neural Networks can tackle is determining when people are making a fake smile. Intuitively we… Read More
Webinar: A Tool for Process and Device Evaluation
Not only are foundries continuing to introduce processes at new advanced nodes, they are frequently updating or adding processes at existing nodes. There are many examples that illustrate this well. TSMC now has 16FF, 16FF+ and now 16FFC. They are also announcing 10nm and 7nm processes. In addition, they are going back to older… Read More
What SOC Size Growth Means for IP Management
Whether or not in the past you believed all the of rhetoric about exploding design complexity in SOC’s, today there can be no debate that SOC size and complexity is well beyond something that can be managed without some kind of design management system. As would be expected, development of most larger designs relies on a data management… Read More
Waze May Not Be So Evil After All
In contrast to the opinions in a recent article here, I think Waze is extremely beneficial to the individuals who use it, other drivers – by virtue of more efficient road usage, and the various jurisdictions that oversee roads and highways. For those not familiar with Waze, it is a smartphone app that provides navigation and… Read More
How HBM Will Change SOC Design
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) promises to do for electronic product design what high-rise buildings did for cities. Up until now, electronic circuits have suffered from the equivalent of suburban sprawl. HBM is a radical transformation of memory architecture that will have huge ripple effects on how SOC based electronics are … Read More
Upcoming ARM & Open-Silicon Webinar on Custom SOC’s for IoT
IoT products call for a higher level of system integration than ever before. Companies seeking to go to market now have a much higher bar in terms of size, power, reliability and manufacturability. The first IoT devices evolved from embedded development boards, like the groundbreaking Arduino. These were fine for prototypes … Read More
Enterprise SSD SOC’s Call for a Different Interconnect Approach
The move to SSD storage for enterprise use brings with it the need for difficult to design enterprise capable SSD controller SOC’s. The benefits of SSD in hyperscale data centers are clear. SSD’s offer higher reliability due to the elimination of moving parts. They have a smaller foot print, use less power and offer much better performance.… Read More
HW Emulator Apps Open Doors to Entirely New Uses
When the topic of hardware emulation comes up, thoughts of big iron customarily come to mind. However, hardware emulation has evolved significantly and now there are other important traits that distinguish the offerings in this area. For a very long period of time emulators provided primarily a method to accelerate gate level… Read More
Neural Networks Ready for Embedded Platforms
If you are not yet familiar with the term Convolutional Neural Networks, or CNN for short, you are certainly bound to become in the year ahead. Using Artificial Intelligence in the form of CNN is on the verge of replacing a large number of computing tasks, especially those involving recognizing things such as sounds, shapes, objects,… Read More
Huawei’s and SMIC’s Requirement for 5nm Production: Improving Multipatterning Productivity