Processor cores come in a wide variety of speeds, performance and capabilities, so it may take you some time to find the proper processor for your system. Let’s say that you are designing a product for the industrial, automotive, military or medical markets that has an inherent requirement for safety, security and reliability… Read More





Design for Ultra-Low Power LTE: CEVA Webinar
You might have thought that ultra-low power communication for the IoT was limited to standards like BT5 and 802.15.4 (eg in ZigBee and Thread) which depend on gateways to cellular networks and limit reach, especially deep inside buildings. But now there’s a new standard for ultra-low power and ultra-low cost based on LTE, known… Read More
Mentor’s Battle of the Photonic Bulge
A few weeks back I wrote an article mentioning that Mentor Graphics has been quietly working on solutions for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for some time now, while one of their competitors has recently established a photonics beachhead. One of the most common challenges for PIC designs is their curvilinear nature, thus… Read More
Qualcomm Brings Us One Step Closer To Gigabit LTE Speed Products
Qualcomm announced at their 4G/5G Summit in Hong Kong specific products their 1 Gigabit Snapdragon X16 LTE modem will ship inside of. In February, the company announced, as we wrote in Forbes last Febraury here, that they had achieved speeds of up to 1 Gbps using this newly-announced Snapdragon X16 modem. Many questioned when we… Read More
Dark data to fuel warp speed growth for #IoT
In my world of semiconductors, dark silicon refers to transistors that are present in the chip but that can not be turned on due to thermal constraints. A valid resource that is available but not used. In the case of #IoT we have a lot of data already out there that I would label as dark data, it exists but no one outside the network owner… Read More
Hack This? Making Software a Moving Target
It sometimes seems that the black hats are always one step ahead of the white hats in the never-ending security game. One of the especially invidious ways hackers have found to evade detection is through mutation – changing the code in a virus on each copy, defeating classical signature detection methods and potentially requiring… Read More
It’s Better than SUPREM for 3D TCAD
Process and device engineers have a tough task to model and simulate an IC process prior to fabricating silicon, however this approach is much better than the alternative choice in the 1970’s of just running multiple lots of wafers and then making measurements to see if your node was meeting specifications. Out of Stanford… Read More
The Future of FPGA Prototyping!
This interview originally appeared as the foreword to our book “Prototypical: The Emergence of FPGA-based Prototyping for SoC Design” but I thought it would be worth publishing for those of you who have not downloaded it yet. I also wanted to mention that our friends at S2C are currently offering a 50% discount on the… Read More
It’s Apple TomTom Time Again
It’s December and time for the annual Apple-should-buy-TomTom rant. Of course, we know Apple prefers younger, smaller companies with brighter and clearer long-term prospects, but we also know Apple navigation sucks and if there is one thing TomTom does well it’s navigation… and traffic.
To stir the pot, … Read More
How The Snapdragon X50, World’s First 5G Modem, Puts Qualcomm Ahead Of The Curve
Regardless of what part of technology you come from, the entire tech industry has been talking about 5G. 5G will reshape the way we will use mobile devices, deliver self-driving cars and smart cities, and even the way get content delivered to our homes. Some companies talk about it to be part of the conversation, while others lead … Read More
Emerging NVM Technologies: ReRAM Gains Visibility in 2024 Industry Survey