Articles – Page 172

September 28, 2015

A simple, straightforward EDA whitepaper recently got me asking some demographic questions. The answers say something about where analog and digital designs are being done – and where they’re coming together. (And yes – sorry, but the Internet of Things (IoT) is involved.)

Whitepapers are popular these days. Nothing new about the whitepaper concept, but how many of them get written during a given period of time (shall we call it the “whitepaper density”?) varies with the economic cycle. And the density is high at the moment.

Whitepapers can be a really useful way to get … Read More → "Boning Up on Analog"

Just a Second

What Is a Second and How Do You Measure It?

by Dick Selwood

September 24, 2015

It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg question. Do we improve accuracy in time-keeping in response to the needs of a new technology, or do we get new technologies because we can be more accurate in measuring time?

Early rural societies didn’t need accuracy much greater than morning, afternoon, dinnertime, etc. As things got more sophisticated, accuracy became more important. Urban societies required more co-ordination, and so public clocks, often with bells to toll the hour and later the quarter hour, were set up. Long sea journeys, particularly driven by the commercial and … Read More → "Just a Second"

Prototyping the Next Generation

Synopsys Introduces HAPS-80

by Kevin Morris

September 22, 2015

Moore’s Law, Moore’s Law, Moore’s Law… Up and to the right on a log scale. More of everything forever. Constantly getting bigger, faster and better; more complex, harder to design, more expensive to build, and… way, way harder to verify and debug.

Moore’s Law can make you dizzy standing still.

One thing we have learned in the past couple of decades is that prototyping complex systems before committing to silicon is basically mandatory. And programmable logic is by far the best and most widely accepted … Read More → "Prototyping the Next Generation"

The PC Is Dead! Long Live the PC!

Microchip’s MEC1418 Keeps Old Interfaces Alive In New Ways

by Jim Turley

September 22, 2015

Yesterday I dusted off some old floppy disks – literally blew dust off of them – so that I could salvage their data while there was still time. Trouble was, I didn’t have a computer with a floppy drive. How to read the disks?

Ironically, the only reason I even had these old floppies lying around was because they were supposed to be my super-safe backups. Apparently sometime in the 1990s I figured that 3.5” floppy disks would be the eternal medium for safeguarding my most precious digital data, which evidently included saved games from Quake II … Read More → "The PC Is Dead! Long Live the PC!"

Guarding the Gate

Authentication in the IoT

by Bryon Moyer

September 21, 2015

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

You’re in a hotel, dead tired from a long day of meetings. There’s a knock on the door; you ask who it is, and they respond, “Room service.” Perfect; you had no energy to go out, and so you ordered up to dine in … Read More → "Guarding the Gate"

The $5 Supercomputer

Atmel’s SAMD2 Series Looks Like Any MCU, but…

by Jim Turley

September 16, 2015

Ho-hum, another ARM-based microcontroller. Not really news, right? But every once in a while you get surprised in this business.

Today I got surprised by Atmel and its new SAMA5D2 series of MCU chips. At first, they sounded like any other low-cost family of MCUs – and, in a lot of ways, they are. They’re based on the popular ARM Cortex-A5 CPU core; they have on-chip peripheral controllers; they come in a few different packages; and prices start at $4.95 in decent volumes.

But one interesting factoid jumped out at me. Atmel offers a choice … Read More → "The $5 Supercomputer"

Problem Personality

One Strategy Does Not Fit All

by Kevin Morris

September 15, 2015

Perhaps nothing is more personal and individual to engineers than our particular strategies for solving problems. In decades of managing scores of engineers on dozens of projects, I’ve carefully watched literally hundreds of engineers at work. Each one has a characteristic style, a way of thinking that becomes visible, a process for harvesting and then narrowing possibilities that is both analytical and intuitive at the same time.

Problem solving is perhaps the only engineering skill that is not transient. During our careers, we’ll dive into dozens of technologies that will later … Read More → "Problem Personality"

Big Data in Semi Manufacturing

Rummaging for Better Results

by Bryon Moyer

September 14, 2015

He looked yet one more time out onto the crime scene. The answer was out there somewhere. But how many times could he come back “with fresh eyes,” hoping to see something he hadn’t seen the last time? Dried leaves turned a particular way… dirt compacted ever more slightly here than there… distinctions hard to make out with the naked eye, but, given enough data and some way to sort through it all, he knew a pattern would emerge that would lead him to the answers he needed.

A few weeks back, Read More → "Big Data in Semi Manufacturing"

Imagination Imagines a 5G Future

Will Fifth-Generation Wireless Standard be the One to Rule Them All?

by Jim Turley

September 9, 2015

Without science fiction, we’d have no science. After all, somebody had to dream about flying to the moon before somebody else could start working on it. Without the idea of robots, nobody would invent robots. And without imagining what a universal wireless network would be like, we’ll never get one.

We may still never get one, but it won’t be for lack of trying.

Now that 4G wireless has barely rolled out in parts of the world, we’re already working on 5G. And, like the journey of a thousand miles that … Read More → "Imagination Imagines a 5G Future"

Low Power, Wide Area

A Survey of Longer-Range IoT Wireless Protocols

by Bryon Moyer

September 7, 2015

If there’s one thing the Internet of Things (IoT) has in abundance, it’s protocols. Some are standards, some are standards-in-progress, and some are proprietary. I’ve done some cursory reviews before, but each survey seems to raise at least as many questions as it answers. We saw that with the deeper dive into messaging protocols; things will be no different with this piece today. Probably worse, actually – in the … Read More → "Low Power, Wide Area"