Articles – Page 126

May 15, 2018

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” — George Bernard Shaw

Spoiler alert: We’re ignorant and we like it.

Not stupid, necessarily – just uninformed, in the dark, unaware. It’s part of who we are. In fact, we depend on it.

All of cryptography is based on secrecy and ignorance. You and I know the key, but the bad guys don’t. That one secret (or a collection of them) is all that prevents them from taking our stuff. You know the combination to your bike lock but nobody else … Read More → "In Defense of Ignorance"

Seeing and Being Seen

Two Dissimilar Vision Announcements

by Bryon Moyer

May 14, 2018

Vision in living beings is a pretty incredible thing. The eyeball hardware and the brain software seem effortlessly to do what we struggle to do in inorganic hardware and software. But we’re making progress. And, today, we take on two vision topics – but, unlike in the past, they’re not closely related. They’re about two very different aspects of vision. And we’ll take them in the order of announcement.

Ps and Qs

We’ll start with a new revision of Cadence’ … Read More → "Seeing and Being Seen"

Who’s on First?

Bleeding-Edge Process Technology Status Update: Intel vs TSMC vs GlobalFoundries

by Steven Leibson

May 10, 2018

“Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third.”—Abbot and Costello

Recent news regarding progress made by semiconductor process technology’s major players has left me feeling like I’m listening to the classic Abbot and Costello “Who’s on First?” baseball comedy skit. Abbot and Costello are simultaneously hilarious and confusing in their rapid-fire delivery, and the situation is much the same with the self-proclaimed “true leaders” in IC process technology. Case in … Read More → "Who’s on First?"

Battling with the Heavy Hitters

VeriSilicon's Vivante GPU is the "Other" Alternative

by Jim Turley

May 9, 2018

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” — Henry V, Act IV, Scene iii

What’s it like to be the underdog? To be the little guy, the “other” choice, the alt-weekly against the big daily newspaper, the Toledo Mud Hens instead of the San Francisco Giants?

It’s honest work and it pays the bills, but you know you’ll never make it to the big leagues. Does that discourage the engineers and dishearten the salespeople?

“It’s been a blast!” says Dave Jarmon, Senior Vice President of Worldwide … Read More → "Battling with the Heavy Hitters"

Molto Legato Senza Failure

New Reliability Simulation from Cadence

by Kevin Morris

May 8, 2018

In music, Legato means smooth and connected, without distinct breaks. Or, in electronics parlance – analog. Analog circuits are arguably the most difficult to design and the most complex to simulate. Engineers with mystical knowledge and decades of experience toil endlessly to find just the right combination of component values that will yield the desired results. And that’s just for the nominal case.

Now, try putting that analog device you just designed into mass production with process and temperature variations, power supply inconsistencies, and any of the myriad possible combinations of mayhem that the universe inflicts on … Read More → "Molto Legato Senza Failure"

Five Major Adds by Coventor

A Summary of SEMulator3D 7.0

by Bryon Moyer

May 7, 2018

Coventor released its most recent version of their SEMulator3D tool not long ago. Just as a refresher, this is the tool that lets process engineers model, analyze, and visualize the impact of a semiconductor process. If you’ve seen nothing else about them, you might have seen animated movies of a process building itself up layer by layer in a conference presentation here or there.

They’ve enumerated five big changes in this last release, along with lots of little … Read More → "Five Major Adds by Coventor"

Mid-Range Mayhem

The Best Blue-Collar FPGAs

by Kevin Morris

May 3, 2018

We give far too much air time to high end FPGAs. It’s too easy, really. Our eyes glaze over at all the talk of FinFETs, 58 gig PAM4 SerDes, optical transceivers, HBM stacks, and gazillions of monster-truck LUTs, and we find ourselves hammering away at our keyboards fantasizing about all the amazing things that will be accomplished by these milestone achievements in semiconductor engineering.

But, when we take the time to grab a Lyft out of our fancy gated neighborhood on the hill to hang out in the work-a-day logic … Read More → "Mid-Range Mayhem"

MIPS I7200 Breaks the Chain

New 32-bit CPU Design Isn’t Very RISC-like Anymore

by Jim Turley

May 2, 2018

“It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.” — Galileo Galilei

Heresy! Sacrilege! Apostasy! The RISC orthodoxy has been profaned! Get the pitchforks and assemble the townspeople while I look for my wooden stake.

The High Sparrow and Lord Protector of RISC canon, MIPS Technologies, has decided that the RISC code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules. Welcome aboard the MIPS I7200.

To hell with orthodoxy, say we. We just want our embedded microprocessors to work efficiently, quickly, and expeditiously. … Read More → "MIPS I7200 Breaks the Chain"

How Does a Car Talk to the Cloud?

Excelfore Has an Idea

by Bryon Moyer

April 30, 2018

Pop quiz: Is a car a Thing?

This gets us into that perennial discussion of what goes into what group. There are tons of IoT gadgets that fit into the IoT group, but is a car one of them? After all, the car of the future will communicate with the cloud, so it will be on the internet. And it is, of course, a lower-case thing. But does it rate upper case?

Talking to Excelfore, the answer is, “No.” There are, however, lots of Things in a car. Which I guess would make it more … Read More → "How Does a Car Talk to the Cloud?"

Learn Programming from Facebook!

Social Media Can Teach Us a Lot About Good Coding

by Jim Turley

April 25, 2018

“Lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math.” — anonymous

We’ve all been there. Your friend posts something stupid on Facebook, so you add a comment, patiently pointing out that they’ve mindlessly forwarded some bogus, ill-informed, or downright fabricated meme as if it were gospel truth. No, the airlines are not giving away free tickets today to celebrate their anniversary. Diet soda is not rotting your stomach. And an asteroid is not about to destroy Earth (but if you’re worried, please send all your money to me).