Primarius 2B

A Public Synchronizer

A Public Synchronizer
by Jerry Cox on 02-09-2015 at 7:00 am

You might ask yourself “Why would anyone want to have a public synchronizer available to download?” Usually designers just grab a flip-flop from his or her company’s or a standard cell vendor’s library. However, are these handy solutions the best course of action today? Current SoC designs have numerous clock domains providing… Read More


Webinar: How IoT Designs Driven by Cost Power Security

Webinar: How IoT Designs Driven by Cost Power Security
by admin on 02-08-2015 at 8:30 pm

SoCs being developed for the fast growth Internet-of-Things market will sell for and operate on a small fraction of the power of mobile devices’ chips. More importantly, IoT SoCs will be far more vulnerable to hacker attacks than the much better protected chips in portable devices. As a result, designers developing SoCs targeting… Read More


Integrated Spec Design & Documentation for SoC

Integrated Spec Design & Documentation for SoC
by Daniel Payne on 02-08-2015 at 1:00 pm

One challenge in SoC projects is maintaining consistency between the specification, design and documentation throughout the product lifecycle. Imagine the chaos if your specification for power is 300 mW, the design is actually 350 mW and the documentation promises 250 mW. Traditionally the design and documentation process… Read More


FD-SOI at Samsung

FD-SOI at Samsung
by Paul McLellan on 02-08-2015 at 7:00 am

Various foundries have made announcements about licensing FD-SOI technology from ST Microelectronics and then fallen quiet. GlobalFoundries made an announcement a couple of years ago. Samsung made an announcement just before DAC last year. But neither company has said anything much since. Of course the big noise at 14/16nm… Read More


Has the Semiconductor Industry Gone Mad?

Has the Semiconductor Industry Gone Mad?
by Daniel Nenni on 02-07-2015 at 7:00 pm

The weather in Taiwan last week was very strange. It was so cold I tried to turn on the heat in my hotel room only to find out it was not possible. If you want more heat they bring a portable heater because who needs central heat in Hsinchu? Even stranger is all of the media hyperbole on the next process nodes:

Intel CFO: We’re so farRead More


Product Review: Bose – SoundTrue Around-Ear Headphones

Product Review: Bose – SoundTrue Around-Ear Headphones
by Daniel Payne on 02-07-2015 at 7:00 am

My old headphones with microphone lost a channel, so it was time to upgrade and I went shopping for something that had high fidelity and fit over my ears, instead of on my ears. After some online research I opted for the Bose headphones, because that brand has been around for decades, they offer many models to choose from, and are readily… Read More


Why Would You Leave Yahoo to Go Into EDA?

Why Would You Leave Yahoo to Go Into EDA?
by Paul McLellan on 02-06-2015 at 7:00 am

I sat down this afternoon with Peter Theunis, the CTO of Methodics. Conveniently their office is about a 15 minute walk from where I live so we could chat face to face.

Peter started programming when he was 8 and his first “product” was a weather system for orchards where sensors in the orchards would send information … Read More


Cadence 2014 Results

Cadence 2014 Results
by Paul McLellan on 02-05-2015 at 7:01 pm

Cadence announced their Q4 and 2014 results yesterday. They are the only one of the big 3 EDA companies whose fiscal year is the calendar year so Synopsys and Mentor will not be joining them in announcing them this week.

I won’t go into the numbers in detail, you can find them all easily enough. But it is a pity that statements like… Read More


Google Glass: The Second Coming and a Brief History

Google Glass: The Second Coming and a Brief History
by Majeed Ahmad on 02-05-2015 at 4:00 pm

Google Glass is dead; long live Google Glass. That’s how Ori Inbar stated the recent closure of Google Glass beta-test project in his report titled “Smart Glasses Market 2015: Towards 1 Billion Shipments” released by www.augmentedreality.org.

Inbar says that Google, a smart glass pioneer, not only compromised its status in … Read More


Concept: From Schematics to Debug

Concept: From Schematics to Debug
by Paul McLellan on 02-05-2015 at 7:00 am

In the late 1990s I was the VP Engineering at Ambit Design Systems. We had a synthesis product (called BuildGates, nobody ever forgot the name). Both our own engineers and our customers wanted to be able to take a look at the gate-level netlist that was generated from their RTL. We used a product from a company called Concept Engineering… Read More