This is the second part in our two-part series on the SADP version of double-patterning. I’d make some crack about your brains having recovered after Part 1, but realistically, despite all my overdramatic whining, that wasn’t that bad. That was the easy part.
In the first part, we looked at fundamental SADP concepts. (If you haven’t read it and this is new to you, I highly recommend…) But in … Read More → "The Evil Twin Gets Evil"
Let me just start by saying, “I Told You So.”
Cloud-storage company Nirvanix just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, abruptly shutting its doors and informing its customers that they have exactly two weeks to come get their data.
Two whole weeks. For every customer to retrieve all the data that was presumably (a) massive enough to require offsite cloud storage, and (b) important enough to require offsite cloud storage.
What are you going to do, start a marathon download from Nirvanix’s servers to yours? And then upload it all again to a … Read More → "Cloud Storage Service Craters"
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Donec adipiscing felis sit amet sem cursus rhoncus. Morbi at lorem dapibus, mollis urna non, luctus eros. Proin volutpat, est nec posuere pellentesque, risus nunc fermentum felis, vel suscipit lorem sem id dolor. Donec est nunc, lobortis vel arcu quis, adipiscing egestas ante.
Sed convallis vitae nulla quis tristique. Etiam porttitor fermentum sodales. Pellentesque rutrum diam … Read More → "Testing Has Happened!"
Ten years ago, we had a vision – a vision of a new kind of trade publication: one that was completely digital; one that gave top-quality objective analysis and editorial on the electronics industry; one with a personality and a sense of humor that made professional engineering articles fun and interesting as well as informative; one staffed by people with firsthand experience in the engineering trenches and deep knowledge of the industry.
Then, we said, “Nah,” and created this one instead.
OK, kidding aside, this is our ten-year anniversary and … Read More → "Ten Years"
This was going to be a story exposing a simmering feud, an ongoing debate, a religious war. As it turns out, it feels more like violent agreement than anything else.
I’m not here to point fingers at anyone. I am here, however, to discuss pointing. I’ll bet you didn’t know there was a technical debate about that, now, did you? Let’s talk first about what we’re talking about, and then I’ll return to the controversial (?) bits.
Pointing is, of course, natural. Even dogs can figure out when we’re … Read More → "Absolute vs. Relative Pointing"
I’m sure we’ve all seen pictures or videos of them – little R2D2 wannabes running up and down the factory floor, doing their masters’ bidding as they retrieve this thing and put that thing away. Like magic, they wander around the warehouse as if they knew where they were going.
Well, the fact is, they don’t know where they’re going. And they don’t have nearly the self-sufficiency of the iconic Star Trek* supporting character. In a discussion at Semicon West with Dr. Matthias Merten of MetraLabs Automation and Dr. Karli Hantzschmann of … Read More → "Factory Robot Navigation"
When is software faster than hardware? And when does the physical location of your electronic bits matter?
When you’re programming a multicore processor, evidently. Two researchers at MIT have been delving into the arcane art of cache management, and they discovered that their software routine can do it better than today’s all-hardware approaches. By simulating billions of instructions’ worth of code on 16-core and 64-core processors, the team has come up with a unique new way to manage on-chip cache. Their software manager, dubbed Jigsaw, can double performance while slashing power consumption by up to 72%. … Read More → "Jigsaw Juggles Cache Management"
There are two “go-to” products in the mechanical world – duct tape and WD-40. WD-40 for things that are stuck together and are not supposed to be, and duct tape for things that are not stuck together, but we want them to be.
The digital world has its duct tape too, of course. When you have two parts of your design that aren’t designed to talk to each other, you need some nice, sticky gates in between that will allow tab A to fit slot B, and not in a parallel-peg-in-a-serial-hole kinda’ way. … Read More → "Digital Duct Tape"
What follows is something I enter into with great trepidation. Getting this… article thing… to a point where you can read it has involved more brain cell abuse than I inflicted upon myself during my entire college career. OK, it sort of feels like that, anyway.
We’re going to talk about double-patterning. Yeah, I know, we’ve talked about it before and it wasn’t so bad, was it? Ah, that’s because there isn’t just one double-patterning: there are two. Actually, there are more than two, but most of … Read More → "Double-Patterning’s Evil Twin"
Circuit reliability verification has become a crucial step in IC design. Reliability requirements are not only growing in all market segments, including automotive/transportation, medical, mobile/wireless, and consumer electronics, but the complexity of today’s circuits is presenting unprecedented verification challenges. To get these designs to market in a timely manner, while ensuring they will perform as designed, designers need automated circuit reliability solutions that can quickly and accurately analyze these complex designs.
From the designer’s perspective, two critical factors in efficient reliability verification are:
