Power Management Policies for Android Devices

Power Management Policies for Android Devices
by Daniel Payne on 10-20-2014 at 10:00 pm

I’ll never forget the shock when I upgraded from a Feature Phone to my first Android-powered SmartPhone, because all of a sudden my battery life went from 6 days down to only 1 day between charges. As a consumer, I really want my battery to last much longer than one day, so the race is on for mobile phone companies to design their… Read More


Single Event Upsets

Single Event Upsets
by Paul McLellan on 06-25-2014 at 5:04 pm

Do you know what a SEE is? It stands for single event upset. We live on a radioactive planet which is also bombarded with cosmic rays, so particles are bombarding our chips. The materials used in packaging also can create particles that cause problems, even the solder. Reliability and aging has been an area that has not been at the forefront… Read More


Book review: “shift left” with virtual prototypes

Book review: “shift left” with virtual prototypes
by Don Dingee on 03-26-2014 at 1:00 pm

Shipping a product with complete software support at official release is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Inevitably, there is less than enough hardware to go around, and what little there is has to fill the needs of hardware designers, test and certification engineers, software development teams, systems integration teams,… Read More


How to Develop Accurate Yet High Performance Models

How to Develop Accurate Yet High Performance Models
by Pawan Fangaria on 01-13-2014 at 12:00 pm

In today’s environment of semiconductor design, SoCs are crammed with various IPs with multiple functionalities and processors integrated together. In such an event it has become necessary to model the system and verify on Virtual Platform before getting into actual design and fabrication. And that requires modelling of each… Read More


Signal integrity: more than just SerDes analysis

Signal integrity: more than just SerDes analysis
by Don Dingee on 03-29-2013 at 1:00 am

When Cadence acquired Sigrity in 2012, two motives were involved: get more competitive in state of the art signal integrity analysis, and grab a foothold into the other vendor’s PCB flows in an area that is developing as a real sore spot for digital designers.

Just as the days where PCB tape-out meant actually using tape are over, … Read More


When the lines on the roadmap get closer together

When the lines on the roadmap get closer together
by Don Dingee on 02-28-2013 at 12:53 pm

Tech aficionados love roadmaps. The confidence a roadmap instills – whether using tangible evidence or just a good story – can be priceless. Decisions on “the next big thing”, sometimes years and a lot of uncertain advancements away, hinge on the ability of a technology marketing team to define and communicate a roadmap.

Any roadmap… Read More


Cadence Mixed Signal Technology Summit

Cadence Mixed Signal Technology Summit
by Paul McLellan on 09-21-2012 at 6:46 pm

Yesterday I attended some of the Cadence mixed-signal technology summit. The day ended with a panel session on Are We Closing the Gap Yet in Mixed-signal Design? Richard Goering moderated. The panelists were all mixed signal experts:

  • Nayaz Khan of Maxim
  • Nishant Shah of Broadcom
  • Shiv Sikand of IC Manage
  • Bill Meier of Texas Instruments
Read More

ARM big.LITTLE Virtual Platforms

ARM big.LITTLE Virtual Platforms
by Paul McLellan on 04-03-2012 at 7:11 pm

You have probably heard something about ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. This links a Cortex-A15 multi-core CPU with a Cortex-A7 CPU. The A15 is a high-performance processor and the A7 is a very low power processor. The basic idea is that when high-performance is required (playing a graphical video game on your smartphone,… Read More


Power Issues for Chip and Board: webinar

Power Issues for Chip and Board: webinar
by Paul McLellan on 03-10-2012 at 4:24 pm

Last month Brian Bailey at EDN moderated an interesting webinar about power issues. Unusually, it combined two different domains: doing things by modeling and actually taking measurements off real chips and boards. The two participants were Arvind Shanmugavel from the Apache subsidiary of Ansys, and Randy White from Tektronix.… Read More


Yes, there is such a thing as a free…model

Yes, there is such a thing as a free…model
by Paul McLellan on 02-09-2012 at 8:18 pm

I have been saying for years, ever since I started working at VaST, the biggest barrier to adoption of virtual platform technology for what I like to call virtualized software development is the availability of models. If models do not already exist when they are needed there are two issues: it takes money to develop them but, probably… Read More