Editors' Blog

Small single-package IMU

Bosch-Sensortec recently announced a new integrated IMU, the BMI055.

Which, amongst other things, brings up the question: exactly what is an IMU? While researching this for a gyroscope article couple of years ago, I found that the term (which stands for “inertial measurement unit”) was used to refer generically to a class of sensors that use some type of inertia as a way of sensing motion. That inertia might be linear (using an accelerometer) or rotational (using a gyroscope).

2 Spicey?

by Amelia Dalton

Tanner just announced the integration of Berkeley Design Automation’s (BDA’s) FastSPICE into their flow. You may remember Tanner as a company that does things their own way, offering a full suite of tools for custom design. Including their own T-SPICE.

And their own T-SPICE doesn’t seem to be going away; it’s not being replaced by FastSPICE. I got a chance to talk about that with Vice President of Marketing and Business Strategy John Zuk to … Read More → "2 Spicey?"

Cadence Supports NVMe

by Dick Selwood

Last year, a new standard was overlaid on PCI Express (PCIe) to reset the way non-volatile memory (NVM) is accessed. To date, solid-state disk (SSD) access methodologies had been modeled around the existing mechanisms and limitations surrounding “spinning media” – hard drives. As solid-state memories start to proliferate in roles that used to be dominated by hard drives, those limitations and mechanisms change.

The new standard that accomplishes this is called NVM Express (NVMe), and it uses the basics of PCIe to handle moving the data around, since that’s often how these memory … Read More → "Cadence Supports NVMe"

Graphene Quilts

by Amelia Dalton

A while back we looked at wide bandgap materials like GaN when used for power devices, but, along with power comes heat and the need for it to be dissipated. GaN isn’t great for that; the old sapphire substrates were very bad, and newer (and more expensive) SiC substrates are better but not sufficient, according to researchers at UC Riverside.

Metal is often used as a heat sink, but its ability to do so in very thin films dissipates because the main & … Read More → "Graphene Quilts"

Powering Up Power Analysis

by Kevin Morris

Apache has just released their latest RedHawk version, RedHawk-3DX. In it they’ve focused on areas of growing importance for power: 3D ICs, working at the RTL level, and scaling up the size of sub-20-nm designs.

Power is of particular concern for 3D ICs because of the fact that a “cube” of silicon is much harder to cool than a plane. And it’s not a monolithic cube; it’s a bunch of interconnected planes that can become detached if you’re not careful. Even the TSVs can be … Read More → "Powering Up Power Analysis"

FPGA Prototype Debug Access

by Jim Turley

When tracing events on any kind of system, it’s always faster to go local: the farther away the data has to go, the slower it goes. Which is why FPGAs are nice in that their internal memory can be used as a trace buffer, allowing really fast capture.

But that also means that you have to have that memory available. Synopsys has announced a daughter card for their HAPS prototype systems that allows fast capture to an off-chip memory. It uses their custom HAPS-TRAK connector. The clock can run over 200 MHz, but it’s … Read More → "FPGA Prototype Debug Access"

The New (Pro)Vocative

by Bryon Moyer

OK, going off script here a bit…

English has been much simplified over the years as compared to its long-ago forebears. Yeah, it’s complicated in its irregularity, but structurally, we’ve lost, among other things, the many cases that other languages use to decline their nouns. Those of you that learned German know of the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. But there are many other cases in different languages.

One of them is the vocative case. This is used when addressing someone directly. Given two sentences, “Bob will go to … Read More → "The New (Pro)Vocative"

High-Sigma Simulations

by Amelia Dalton

We’ve noted before that the meaning of “corners” is much less obvious for analog circuits than it is for digital. Solido noted in a recent announcement that memory design in particular highlights the challenge. Memories are built of analog circuits that are repeated numerous times, and getting them all to yield on aggressive processes with enormous variation is a tough job.

They say that the standard Monte Carlo “run enough samples to cover the space, and then interpolate … Read More → "High-Sigma Simulations"

Emulator in the Cloud

by Amelia Dalton

The other day we noted the launch of Mentor’s Veloce2. There’s one other angle to their release that sidestepped the main announcement. And that is that they will make available a cloud version of Veloce2.

We’ve looked at the different models used for tools in the cloud, including Synopsys and Cadence, Altium</ … Read More → "Emulator in the Cloud"

Brighter LEDs

by Kevin Morris

Cree has been manufacturing press releases on brighter LEDs almost as fast as they are (presumably) making the LEDs themselves. And, in one release, they credit a technology they call SC³ for the advances. But, as with many such technology brandings, they didn’t really say much about what it was.

Was it a revolutionary new approach? A big “aha” moment catapulting them forward? Or a collection of incremental things that they bound together and let the marketing department call a “technology”?

Well, its kinda some of both. … Read More → "Brighter LEDs"