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FPGAs – The Possibilities are Endless – Almost

FPGAs – The Possibilities are Endless – Almost
by Luke Miller on 04-26-2013 at 8:00 pm

Has your wife ever said “Your name, I’m not a computer”? Well maybe mine has. I know what you are thinking… This guy is married? Yup, I over achieved too. Have child #7 on the way Lord willing, so you probably guessed I don’t follow much of the world’s planning and such. Like you, no one in my house really understands what I do, nor cares … Read More


Mentor CEO Wally Rhines U2U Keynote

Mentor CEO Wally Rhines U2U Keynote
by Daniel Nenni on 04-26-2013 at 2:00 pm

You will never meet a more approachable CEO in the semiconductor ecosystem than Dr. Walden C. Rhines. The first time I met Wally was way back when I blogged for food and he invited me over for lunch. Even better, a year or two later I was having dinner with a friend at the DBL Tree in San Jose. Wally was waiting for his flight home so he joined… Read More


When installing a sink, it’s a lot faster to buy a saw

When installing a sink, it’s a lot faster to buy a saw
by Don Dingee on 04-25-2013 at 8:10 pm

Mentor’s announcement from Design West this week pretty much signals the end of standalone ESL tools, in favor of more useful stuff. They have pulled the pieces of their Sourcery CodeBench environment along with their embedded Linux offering and their Vista virtual prototyping platform into a native embedded software development… Read More


Morris Chang on Altera and Intel

Morris Chang on Altera and Intel
by Daniel Nenni on 04-25-2013 at 7:00 pm


If you want to know why I have written so much about TSMC in the past five years here it is: TSMC executives are approachable, personable, answer questions straight on, and have yet to lead me astray. If you want an example of this read the Chairman’s comments on the TSMC Q1 2013 earnings call transcript.

“On 16-nanometer FinFET, we Read More


Best Practice for RTL Power Design for Mobile

Best Practice for RTL Power Design for Mobile
by Paul McLellan on 04-25-2013 at 11:54 am

Mobile devices are taking over the world. If you want lots of graphs and data then look at Mary Meeker’s presentation that I blogged about earlier this week. The graph on the right is just one datapoint, showing that mobile access to the internet is probably up to about 15% now from a standing start 5 years ago.

Of course, one obvious… Read More


Bring high end camera image quality to smartphone

Bring high end camera image quality to smartphone
by Eric Esteve on 04-25-2013 at 9:13 am

We have to go back to 2008 to understand why Super Resolution is desperately needed by smartphone users, expecting to take high quality pictures with their smartphone, at least as good quality as with their camera. It’s in 2008 that smartphone worldwide shipments have surpassed standalone compact camera shipments… and we don’t… Read More


10 to 100X faster HDL Simulation Speeds

10 to 100X faster HDL Simulation Speeds
by Daniel Payne on 04-24-2013 at 10:44 am

Speed, capacity, accuracy – these are the three major EDA tool metrics that we pay attention to and that enable us to design and verify an SoC. Talk to any design or verification engineer and ask if they are satisfied with the time that it takes to simulate their latest design, or to verify that it meets spec and is functionally… Read More


ESD – Key issue for IC reliability, how to prevent?

ESD – Key issue for IC reliability, how to prevent?
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-23-2013 at 8:30 pm

It’s a common electrical rule that when large amount of charge gets accumulated, it tries to break any of its surrounding isolation. Although it wouldn’t have been prominent in 1980s or 90s, protection for ICs from such damaging effects is a must, specifically in large mixed-signal designs of today, working at different voltages… Read More


Gigahertz FFT rates on a 500MHz budget

Gigahertz FFT rates on a 500MHz budget
by Don Dingee on 04-23-2013 at 8:30 pm

A basic building block of any communication system today is the fast Fourier transform, or FFT. A big advantage of FPGA implementations of FFTs is they can be scaled and tuned for the task at hand, optimizing data flow, resource use, and power consumption. Scaled, that is, up to the clock speed of the FPGA – or so it would seem.

Today’s… Read More


CDN Live 2013 in Munich: what’s the next acquisition?

CDN Live 2013 in Munich: what’s the next acquisition?
by Eric Esteve on 04-23-2013 at 8:10 pm

Going to Munich in May could be a very good idea, as it will give you the opportunity to listen to the keynote talk from Lip-Bu Tan. Who knows if you will learn in direct live the name of the next acquisition from Cadence in 2013, after Tensilica and Cosmic Circuits? In fact, there may not be new acquisition announcement, then this keynote… Read More