Nestled amongst the big noisy conventions like CES, ISSCC, and DAC can be found some more modest, highly focused conferences. These shows may cast a smaller shadow, but they may also benefit from the lack of attendant hoopla, since marketing pays less attention and engineers can focus on the business at hand. One such show that just took place was isQED, or the International Symposium on Quality Electronics Design. Now in its ninth year, isQED focuses on the interactions between design, test, quality, and manufacturing disciplines in the effort to improve such aspects as yield, quality, and … Read More → "Making Quality Everyone’s Business"

A few weeks ago, we started looking at ways of reducing power consumption when designing SoCs. We divided the world into the front-end, where the big payoff is, and the back-end, with useful techniques that have less dramatic impact. We looked at architecture and system design, hardware/software allocation and C-to-RTL, multicore, Multi-Voltage Supply (MVS), power switching, Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS), and Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS). These are techniques that can give power savings in the range of 30-50%. Having addressed those, there are numerous back-end techniques that can give more modest, but nonetheless valuable, power savings. We& … Read More → "Attacking Abuses of Power"

Related Applications

None

Field of the Invention

Way out in left field.

Background of the Invention

For purposes of gathering together for reasons including but not limited to sharing information, making commercial announcements, receiving training, professional networking, escaping a nagging spouse or children, and racking up frequent flier miles, it is common for engineering professionals to attend conferences or conventions. Such conferences may consist of convention-center catered meals, speeches in which very important people say what everyone already knows, an exhibit hall wherein more women … Read More → "Methods for Reducing Marketing Jitter Through Filtering of Marketing Noise in Conference Presentations"

Last week’s ISSCC and DesignCon conferences included presentations of developments in non-volatile memory, and we present some highlights here. Some of the papers discussed developments in novel cell types; others addressed improvements in more well-adopted technologies. So first let’s review the different kinds of non-volatile cells being covered to set some context.

The lives of a cell

Flash is the best known of the technologies; it’s the one that the least technically savvy of us might actually go out and buy … Read More → "Bigger and Better Storage"