The speed and power penalties for accessing system RAM affect everything from artificial intelligence platforms to IoT sensor nodes. There is a huge power and performance overhead when the various IP blocks in an SOC need to go to DRAM. Memory caches have become essential to SOC design to reduce these adverse effects. However, … Read More



Stop FinFET Design Variation @ #53DAC and get a free book!
If you plan on visiting Solido (the world leader in EDA software for variation-aware design of integrated circuits) at the Design Automation Conference next month for a demonstration of Variation Designer, register online now and get an autographed copy of “Mobile Unleashed”. Such a deal!
Solido Variation Designer is used by… Read More
Internet of Things Tutorial: Chapter Three
Emerging and future Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems will increasingly comprise mulitple heterogeneous internet connected objects (e.g., sensors), which will be operating across multiple layers (e.g., consider a camera providing a view of a large urban area and another focusing on a more specific location within the same… Read More
Internet of Things Tutorial: Chapter Two
In our Internet-of-Things (IoT) introduction we highlighted Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as two of the most prominent IoT technologies. Indeed, these two technologies can be considered as the forerunners of IoT. During the previous decade, IoT was in most people’s minds … Read More
Internet of Things Tutorial: Chapter One
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is gradually becoming one of the most prominent ICT technologies that underpin our society, through enabling the orchestration and coordination of a large number of physical and virtual Internet-Connected-Objects (ICO) towards human-centric services in a variety of sectors including logistics,… Read More
S2C tutorial and PROTOTYPICAL debut at DAC
It’s been a busy few days here in Canyon Lake, and we’re ready to share exciting news in advance of #53DAC coming up on Monday, June 6[SUP]th[/SUP]. S2C is offering a technical program tutorial on “Overcoming the Challenges of FPGA Prototyping” followed by the launch of our latest book project, “PROTOTYPICAL”, including a field… Read More
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Significantly Improves Performance
The smartphone market has been experiencing many changes, some of those changes have included the slowing of the overall pace of growth. One of the remaining growth segments of the smartphone market right now remains the mid-range which is priced around $200. These phones have traditionally been ignored by the big players in the… Read More
How a Connected Watch Will Change the Connected Car Business
It’s amazing the amount of excitement being ginned up over connected cars. Analyst firms regularly publish estimates of hundreds of millions of connected cars on the road by 2020. It’s enough to make you believe it might happen.
If we even come close to those projections it will be a miracle given the disconnect between the wireless… Read More
Bulking Up of Design Data Calls for Version Control on Steroids
Even though design management systems are gaining popularity as a way to manage design data growth, they actually contribute to the problem of exploding data size. What we already know is that a linear increase in die size causes exponential growth in chip area, and that smaller feature sizes compound this effect in the same way.… Read More
The ASIC Business Model is Critical for the DIY and Maker Movements!
If you look back at the beginning of the ASIC business you will see that it was really a critical time in the semiconductor industry. It all began in the 1980s which coincidentally is when I started my career in Silicon Valley. General purpose integrated circuits ruled the market, forcing system designers to cobble together off-the-shelf… Read More
A Quick Tour Through Prompt Engineering as it Might Apply to Debug