Articles – Page 175

July 22, 2015

So a sports car just drove itself around a racetrack and did pretty well, setting competitive lap times. Audi’s self-driving RS7 lapped Sears Point (aka Sonoma Raceway, aka Infineon Raceway) in just a shade over two minutes. For comparison, the lap record for a Corvette is only nine seconds quicker, at 1:51, and the all-time Porsche GT3 record is 1:42. For a car with no driver, that’s hauling.

The important point here is that the car was not pre-programmed to run a particular course. Sure, it would have been easy to equip the vehicle with a millimeter-perfect … Read More → "Summertime Beach Reading"

The Cost of Teamwork

Could We Eliminate Engineering Meetings Completely?

by Kevin Morris

July 21, 2015

Ask anyone who works in a typical corporate environment to describe their schedule for an average week. Chances are, a significant percentage of their work time will be taken up by meetings. In fact, 30-40% of work hours occupied by meetings would not be an unusual figure. For management employees, greater than 50% would not be surprising.

Stop and think about that for a minute or two.

Did you stop and think about it? Really, go back and stop and think about it again.

As engineers, … Read More → "The Cost of Teamwork"

“The Wave” Goes Micro

Magnonics as Yet Another Electron Alternative

by Bryon Moyer

July 20, 2015

Picture yourself leading a march down the street. If you’re lucky, you’ve got an advance team handling logistics, and traffic has been blocked all around so that there’s nothing to impede your progress.

But imagine now that you come to one particular intersection, and, before you can enter, a few hundred people approach the same intersection from the cross road. They get there before you do, but, rather than passing through and clearing the intersection for you, they start marching back and forth within the intersection.

So when you get to the … Read More → "“The Wave” Goes Micro"

Engineering Agility

FPGAs Necessary, but not Sufficient

by Kevin Morris

July 16, 2015

A good engineer is constantly evolving. We don’t graduate from engineering school perfectly loaded with all the skills and expertise we need. Instead, we graduate with a solid, employable subset of engineering skills. Then, for the rest of our career, we are constantly learning and improving. Each year, we hone new abilities based on the lessons we’ve learned from previous years’ experience. We iteratively improve.

Historically, we have taken the opposite approach with our products. We have tried to nail every possible requirement, then develop a perfect specification, then create an optimal implementation to that … Read More → "Engineering Agility"

DOT-Matrix Driving

Regulation Versus Technology in Everyday Applications

by Jim Turley

July 15, 2015

In Egypt, driving is a contact sport. I spent a few weeks there on vacation and was lucky enough to have been refused a rental car. Consequently, I either walked or hired a local cab driver at ridiculously cheap rates. For the equivalent of $50 I could get a car and driver – for the entire day. Good thing.

Although cities like Cairo have working traffic lights, they’re purely decorative. Same goes for the painted lane lines. They’re not even driving suggestions, they’re just pretty, as if someone decided to beautify the asphalt with … Read More → "DOT-Matrix Driving"

Interop Gets Complicated

Just When You Thought You Understood – and Needed – It

by Bryon Moyer

July 13, 2015

I was wrong.

There: I said it. I can sleep unburdened tonight.

And what earth-threatening mistake had I made? I mistook syntax for semantics. But I get ahead of myself. Let’s dig in to see, first, why anyone would even care about this.

It has to do with – surprise! – the Internet of Things (IoT). Of course. And it has to do with the desire of some to leave behind, or avoid altogether, walled-garden models of interconnected devices that lock users into a particular vendor or technology or… something, in favor of interoperability.</ … Read More → "Interop Gets Complicated"

PUF, the Magic’s Draggin’

Startup Aims to Make Electronics More Trustworthy

by Jim Turley

July 8, 2015

“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” – Ernest Rutherford

If you think about it, “random” is really just a euphemism for any pattern that we don’t understand. Rolling the dice at a casino table produces a random result, but only because we don’t think about it very hard. We understand the physics of momentum; we know the coefficient of friction of the felt on the table; we can calculate the inertial vectors of the throw. Given enough time, we could accurately predict the outcome of any dice roll. It’s even possible … Read More → "PUF, the Magic’s Draggin’"

Bringing Light to Dark Silicon

Gray Silicon and FPGAs

by Kevin Morris

July 7, 2015

For the past few years, we’ve all been hearing the discussions about “Dark Silicon.” Besides being a really cool and ominous-sounding label, dark silicon is an issue that threatens to end multicore scaling on ICs. The reasoning goes like this: “Dennard Scaling” has ended. Dennard Scaling is the concept that power density remains constant as transistors shrink, which gives “Koomey’s Law” its teeth. Koomey’s Law says that performance-per-watt in computation has been improving by approximately a factor of two every 1.57 years.

At the most recent process nodes, the amount of … Read More → "Bringing Light to Dark Silicon"

Decoupling Formal Technology from Formal Technology

OneSpin Lets Others Build the Apps

by Bryon Moyer

July 6, 2015

Formal verification technology appears in the ascendant at the moment. It’s been around forever, it seems, but it’s now finding its way into more flows than ever.

And that’s because users don’t have to deal with formal technology.

The problem with formal is that it’s hard. And, historically, an investment in formal was best matched by an investment in a PhD or two to help out. Or perhaps by hiring some specialist consultants to help out. … Read More → "Decoupling Formal Technology from Formal Technology"

Apple Hints at CPU and OS Independence

New Bitcode Format Could Be the First Step Toward CPU-Neutral Platforms

by Jim Turley

July 1, 2015

ARM, x86, or Apple? That question may make a lot more sense in a few months.

In amongst all the many things that Apple rolled out at its latest Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco was an almost-offhand mention of something called Bitcode. The company didn’t provide a lot of detail and, in fact, seemed to curtail some of its planned discussions just days before the event, but, from outward appearances, Bitcode lays the groundwork for a future filled with CPU-neutral Apple devices.

In other words, Apple may be getting ready to swap … Read More → "Apple Hints at CPU and OS Independence"