Articles – Page 170

November 5, 2015

The electronics and semiconductor markets have always been very competitive, and the ongoing consolidation trend has raised the stakes even higher. Additionally, significant investments must be made and requirements set well before the first unit ships. This up-front effort contributes significantly to the electronics value chain, where concepts and algorithms are invented and implemented as hardware or software. The hardware side is especially challenging due to its permanency and per-unit variable cost. The task of the hardware engineering team is to implement those concepts and algorithms in competitive and cost-effective silicon and to exhaustively verify that it will function … Read More → "System-wide Collaboration"

CPUs Get Cheaper; Transistors Get More Expensive

Synopsys Keynote Presentation Highlights Some Strange Trends

by Jim Turley

November 4, 2015

“…but there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” – Donald Rumsfeld

Some things we know; some things we don’t know. And sometimes we haven’t got a clue. That’s pretty much how engineering feels to most of us, I think. We’re pretty good at our little specialties, and we know enough to be dangerous about other aspects of engineering, but we’re mostly clueless about marketing, or finance, or art history, or proper cesta technique in jai alai.

A Tool for Designing Audio Subsystems

Audio Weaver Claims Big Development Savings

by Bryon Moyer

November 2, 2015

One way of looking at the Internet of Things (IoT) is to think of it as endowing machines with human characteristics – in particular with respect to our ability to sense the world. To some extent, past efforts have served to sense things that we’re not so good at sensing precisely ourselves. Like temperature or pressure or orientation.

That helps humans, who can then combine their own senses with machine senses for better decisions. But if we further enable our machines to do what we can do, then we can have the machines do without us. (I … Read More → "A Tool for Designing Audio Subsystems"

Heterogeneous Processing, SoCs and FPGAs

A Path to Flexible System Implementation

by Dick Selwood

October 29, 2015

Firstly – if you are an existing FPGA user, you may not find much that is new in this piece, but really, it is not aimed at you. What would be useful is if you share it with your system architect colleagues and your software colleagues, for whom much of this may well be new and useful.

You are beginning a new project – let’s say a motor control system. You can assemble components on a board – possibly a processor, a DSP, an FPGA for peripherals, and a networking ASIC. The result is a relatively large board, with … Read More → "Heterogeneous Processing, SoCs and FPGAs"

The Market for Two-Inch Windows

AMD’s Merlin Falcon SoC Crams a Whole PC into a Single Chip

by Jim Turley

October 28, 2015

Well, it’s finally come to this. The PC has shrunk to the size of a single chip.

Oh, sure, we’ve had single-chip computers before. But nothing this advanced, or this close to a “real” PC without compromises. Other single-chip systems (whether PC-compatible or not) typically lag several generations behind the current state of the art, with old processors, old peripherals, and old fabrication technology. They’re either a last gasp before the old CPU is put out to pasture, or an expensive experiment in integration.

Not so with Merlin Falcon, AMD’s new … Read More → "The Market for Two-Inch Windows"

Altera’s Long Game

Intel… Then What?

by Kevin Morris

October 27, 2015

We wrote a lot in these pages (even long before it happened) about the market and technology trends and pressures that led to Intel’s bid to acquire Altera. We dove into the data center and dug up the game-changing combination of conventional processors with FPGA fabric that can form a heterogeneous computing engine, which could conquer the current plague of power problems that limit the size and capacity of server farms around the world. We argued that Intel needed Altera – as a strategic defense to protect its dominance of the data center in a future world … Read More → "Altera’s Long Game"

Faster ATPG and Other Test Goodies

Synopsys Announcements at ITC Time

by Bryon Moyer

October 26, 2015

One of the notable skills repeatedly demonstrated by director Robert Altman was the ability to take a number of smaller stories and knit them together into a larger story. You know, one narrative that pulls the distinct seemingly-unrelated bits together into a larger truth.

Today, we’ve got a few – 3, to be specific – little stories. How to weave them together? What’s the common theme? Well, test, for one. But that’s a blah theme – on reserve in case there’s nothing else.

How about… 10X – as in, many of the bits have 10X improvements … Read More → "Faster ATPG and Other Test Goodies"

The Big Grid

GridComm Turns City Streetlights into a Big Municipal Network

by Jim Turley

October 21, 2015

How would you like to control the world’s biggest dimmer switch? You’d be almost like a comic book supervillain, able to dim the lights of a giant metropolis at will. “Ha ha! I’ll show you, puny Earthlings! Flee in terror as I plunge your world into darkness! Marvel as I turn the brightness back up again!”

As super-powers go, that might be a fairly harmless one. But cool nonetheless. And eco-friendly, too. Because by dimming a city’s streetlights, you can save the town millions of dollars (or rupees, euros, bhat, et cetera</ … Read More → "The Big Grid"

Let There Be Vision

Cadence Tensilica Vision P5 Lets the Light In

by Kevin Morris

October 20, 2015

The Internet of People has cameras – literally billions of them. They are in smartphones, laptops, tablets, WiFi devices – it sometimes seems they’re watching our every move. This incredible volume of information is then (somewhat) intelligently analyzed, edited, and moderated by the vast visual computing power of the enormous array of human brains behind these cameras. The amount of computation required to filter, process, and interpret this image data is staggering. The end result is, of course, an almost infinite wasteland of cat videos on Facebook and YouTube. But video processing has higher purposes as well.

< … Read More →

Of Trapdoors and Elliptic Curves and Braids

Encryption Math Comes to an IoT Device Near You

by Bryon Moyer

October 17, 2015

[Editor’s note: this is the fifth in a series on Internet-of-Things security. You can find the introductory piece here and the prior piece here.]

There’s a good chance that every one of us knows what encryption means. Some of us probably used it as kids, if not as adults. Either for writing a note declaring that “Mrs. Chunderson is a doody-head,” to be passed to a co-conspiring classmate disguised … Read More → "Of Trapdoors and Elliptic Curves and Braids"