In the semiconductor world when we hear “full-stack” we think of a chip, chipset or board with a bunch of software, which can be connected to sensors of various types on one end, trained networks in the middle and actuators on the other side. But of course that’s not really a full-stack. The real thing would be deployment of an entire… Read More
Portable stimulus has been a hot topic for a couple of years in the EDA and semiconductor industries. Many observers see this approach as the next major advance in verification beyond the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), and the next step higher in abstraction for specifying verification intent. The basic idea is to … Read More
AI accelerators as engines for object or speech recognition (among many possibilities), are becoming increasingly popular for inference in mobile and power-constrained applications. Today much of this inferencing runs largely in software on CPUs or GPUs thanks to the sheer size of the smartphone market, but that will shift… Read More
I’m a believer that connectivity for the IoT at scale (the trillions of devices that the industry predicts) has to be cellular. This is partly based on reach, particularly outside urban areas, but is mostly based on the financial implications of that scale. Yes, you can build infrastructure for say local Wi-Fi support with backhaul… Read More
If you practice in advanced levels of power management, you know about dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). This is where you allow some part of a circuit, say a CPU, to run at different voltages and frequencies depending on acceptable performance versus thermal tradeoffs and battery life on a mobile device. Need to run… Read More
Arm is a machine. They crank out new products in a wide range of categories, Project Trillium for AI, Neoverse for infrastructure, their Automotive Enhanced line and the Pelion IoT platform. And in each they have a regular beat of new product introductions following roadmaps they have already laid out. Not that you’d expect any … Read More
Synopsys seems to particularly excel at these events, whether in half-day tutorials at conferences or, as in this case, in a full-day on-site workshop. You might think there’s not much that can be added in this domain, other than to bring low-power newbies up to speed, but you’d be wrong. This event set the stage with surveys on needs… Read More
By now, you should know about AI in the cloud for natural language processing, image ID, recommendation, etc, etc (thanks to Google, Facebook, AWS, Baidu and several others) and AI on the edge for collision avoidance, lane-keeping, voice recognition and many other applications. But did you know about AI in the fog? First, a credit… Read More
SLAM – simultaneous localization and mapping – is critical for mobile robotics and VR/AR headsets among other applications, all of which typically operate indoors where GPS or inertial measurement units are either ineffective or insufficiently accurate. SLAM is a chicken and egg problem in which the system needs to map its environment… Read More
Big prototyping hardware is essential to modern firmware and software development for pre-silicon, multi-billion gate hardware. For hardware verification it complements emulation, running fast enough for realistic testing on big software loads while still allowing fast-switch to emulation for more detailed debug where… Read More
