I recently found a couple of articles which caught my interest, both on roles bacteria can play in electronics. The first has to do with a method to form semiconductor-like structures on a sheet of graphene. Graphene is an excellent conductor but in sheet form but conducts more or less equally in all directions. So the first problem… Read More
PDF Solutions and the Value of Fearless CreativityPDF Solutions has been around for over 30…Read More
Streamlining Functional Verification for Multi-Die and Chiplet DesignsAs multi-die and chiplet-based system designs become more…Read More
Customized PMICs with OTP in automotive and IoT
Power. Every device needs it. Managing it properly can make all the difference between a device people enjoy using and one that is more hassle than it is worth. What happens between the battery and the processor is the job of the power management integrated circuit (PMIC).
Why are PMICs gaining so much attention? Increased power … Read More
Statistical Simulation Provides Insight into 6T SRAM Optimization
ARM’s Azeez Bhavnagarwala recently gave a talk hosted by Solido on the benefits of variation aware design in optimizing 6T bit cells. Azeez sees higher clock rates, increasing usage of SRAM per processor and the escalating number of processors, shown in the diagram below, as trends that push designers toward 6T. Six Transistor… Read More
Tesla: After the Crash
The funny thing about pitching new cars to the general public these days is that no one really wants to think about ever getting into a crash. There was a time when General Motors counted on OnStar as a deciding factor in selling cars because of its post-crash prophylaxis of automatically summoning assistance.
A couple decades of … Read More
MediaTek is on the Move with TSMC!
MediaTek (MTK) recently made the news for announcing their first leading edge SoC (Helio X30), a 32% increase in quarter over quarter sales, and an expected 30% increase for the year. Both of which deserve a closer look as we move into the second half of 2016 which should be very strong for MTK TSMC, and the fabless semiconductor ecosystem.… Read More
The Perfect Wearable SoC…?
Power is Everything
During Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank in the service module exploded forcing the crew to use the lunar module as a life boat to get back home, John Aaron – an incredibly gifted NASA engineer who was tasked with getting the Apollo 13 crew back home safely – flatly stated “Power is everything…we’ve… Read More
IoT Standardization and Implementation Challenges
The rapid evolution of the IoT market has caused an explosion in the number and variety of IoT solutions. Additionally, large amounts of funding are being deployed at IoT startups. Consequently, the focus of the industry has been on manufacturing and producing the right types of hardware to enable those solutions. In current model,… Read More
ARM gets wider and more flexible in vectors
ARM has a storied history of announcing major architecture changes at conferences far in advance of product implementations to get their ecosystem moving. At Hot Chips 2016, their sights are set on revamping the ARMv8-A architecture for a new generation of server and high-performance computing parallelism with a preview of … Read More
Did My FPGA Just Fail?
Designing DRAMs at Intel back in the 1970s I first learned about Soft Errors and the curious effect of higher failure rates of DRAM chips in Denver, Colorado with a higher altitude than Aloha, OR. With the rapid growth of FPGA-based designs in 2016, we are still asking the same questions about the reliability of our chips used for safety-critical… Read More
A New Player in the Functional Verification Space
Israel has a strong pedigree in functional verification. Among others, Verisity (an early contributor to class-based testbench design and constrained random testing) started in Israel and RocketTick (hardware-based simulation acceleration), acquired more recently by Cadence, is based in Israel. So when I hear about an … Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment