Last week my daughter was playing some games on my Google Nexus smartphone for a while when one of my friends called. When I picked up the phone, I couldn’t imagine it was so hot. There is no doubt; every electronic device today emits an order of magnitude higher heat than what it used to at most a decade ago. There is so much emphasis on … Read More
Today, Cadence announced Protium, a new FPGA prototyping platform for software development. During development of an SoC, the most appropriate methodology changes. In the early days, developing RTL, the primary tool is simulation. Then, as the blocks get bigger or as the whole chip starts to come together, typically simulation… Read More
I thought I write about one of the most important subjects in FPGAs, that is power. Power of course is not just based on node size, and it is funny why so many people are concerned about node size. If not just as important is the architectural decisions that drive down power. Do you really care if your part is 16nm or 14nm? Or do you care more… Read More
In the semiconductor industry, it feels great to hear about the process technology shrinking to lower nodes along with innovative transistor structures that offer major gains in PPA (Power, Performance and Area). However, it requires huge investment of capital, time and effort from foundries to conceptualize, prototype and… Read More
One of the challenges with the internet of things (IoT) is that many devices are both always on and battery powered (and not with a large battery). The responsibilities need to be split so that the device senses when it needs to wake up without requiring the application processor to be waking up all the time to make the decision since… Read More
I was a the embedded vision conference last week. Jeff Beir, the founder of the embedded vision alliance gave an introduction to the field. The conference was much bigger than previous years and almost everyone is designing some sort of vision product. Half of your brain is used for vision so it goes without saying that vision requires… Read More
Gary Smith published a list of what to see at DAC, and I noticed that he listed DOCEA Power in a category of ESL Thermal. I’ll be meeting the DOCEA engineers on Wednesday at DAC to learn more about their two newest ESL products:
In general DOCEA Power tools allow you to manage power and thermal… Read More
So you want to do a low power design. Join the club. Who doesn’t? Today all designs are low power, it is the biggest constraint on what we can do on a chip. Power down; power domains, variable clock rates, mixed Vt libraries. Every trick is needed. And that is not even enough. We get to put our phones on charge each evening and there… Read More
Reliability for ICs is a big deal because the last thing that you want to do is ship a new part only to find out later in the field that there are failures not being caught by testing. I’ve already had two consumer products fail this year because of probable reliability issues: My MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM started rebooting caused… Read More
ANSYS acquired Apache Design Automation back in June 2011and three years later the name “Apache” is being subdued in favor of using just ANSYS. One thing that I noticed right away was a DACfocus on having actual ANSYS customers talk about their hands-on experience using the EDA tools. The following seven customers… Read More
