In every chip, power is a progressive problem to be solved. Designers have long had to rely on a combination of experience and knowledge to tackle this dilemma, typically having to wait until after silicon availability to perform power analysis with realistic software workloads. However, this is too late in the game, as it becomes… Read More
Despite the improvements in glass material used in smartphone displays, many, if not all, leading smartphone manufactures such as Apple and other smartphone manufacturers are evaluating a coating method that further increases the durability of screens at a cost of just pennies per display by coating them with diamonds.… Read More
Many of us are now somewhat fluent in IoT-speak, though at times I have to wonder if I’m really up on the latest terminology. Between edge and extreme edge, fog and cloud, not to mention emerging hierarchies in radio access networks – how this all plays out is going to be an interesting game to watch. Ron Lowman, DesignWare IP Product… Read More
I don’t look at the RTL power estimation topic too often these days, so I was interested to see that ANSYS still has a very strong position in this area. Qualcomm is using PowerArtist on one of the most demanding modern applications – mobile GPU power gaming. Mobile gaming heavily loads the GPU, so any optimization in that area will … Read More
When it comes to extremely power sensitive applications such as IoT and edge devices, there is literally an arsenal of power saving techniques that could be used. The tricky part is figuring out which ones to use and how to use them for maximum benefit. This is coupled with the need to not hamper device performance or functionality.… Read More
If you are like me, you will get a 5G phone because of the high bandwidth it offers. However, there is a lot more to 5G than just fast data. In fact, one of the appealing features of 5G is low bandwidth communication. This is useful for edge devices that perform infrequent and low volume data transfers and depend on long battery life. Prior… Read More
Choosing a memory architecture can be a daunting task. There are many options to choose from, each with their own power, performance, area and cost profile. The right choice can make a new design competitive and popular in the market. The wrong choice can doom the whole project to failure.
Vadhiraj Sankaranarayanan, senior technical… Read More
Qualcomm today announced three new chipsets for entry level and mid-range smartphones – Snapdragon 720G, Snapdragon 662, and Snapdragon 460. The first one promises to bring many of the Elite Gaming features of the 765G with support for HDR, dynamic color range and high-quality synchronized sound with Qualcomm aptX Adaptive.… Read More
You know that a technology is becoming a trend to watch when the Economist writes a piece on the topic. We know how big an investment goes into monetizing visual content for our phones, pads and TVs, through the likes of Warner Media, Disney and Netflix. Now there’s a big push into monetizing our ears, driven by Apple and others on the… Read More
When describing the complexity of deep sub-micron systems on chip (SoCs), most engineers and their managers tend to refer to a combination of gate count, amount of embedded memory, and frequency of operation. If one’s task is to assess the complexity of the physical design effort for a given SoC, then there are numerous additional… Read More
