Altera embraces OpenCL with toolkit for FPGAs
Altera has launched the first first SDK to take OpenCL software and target it to FPGAs rather than general-purpose processors or graphics processors.
Author Archives: Chris Edwards
Standards group forms to push ‘white space’ radio
A group of companies based in the UK have formed a group that hopes to develop and promote standards for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that employ gaps in radio spectrum rather than relying on dedicated frequency bands.
ARM’s 64bit shift provides clean-up opportunity
ARM has named the first pair of processor cores that employ its 64bit architecture and revealed that an architectural clean-up is likely to result in the smaller of the pair requiring less silicon real estate than the existing 32bit Cortex-A9.
AMD mixes it up with ARM64 server processors
AMD adopts ARM64 to promote heterogeneous processing and encourage users to break with Intel and x86 in the enterprise market.
Board-level DRC tool to find signal-integrity problems
Mentor Graphics has added to its HyperLynx suite a tool that uses design-rule check (DRC) techniques rather than simulation to look for potential signal-integrity problems.
OMG adopts portable image and signal processing libraries
The Object Management Group has adopted the Vector Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) for C and VSIPL++ for C++ as standard specifications that it will manage and promote.
Is your 20nm process gate-last? Maybe it should be
Modelling work by Gold Standard Simulations indicates that gate-last is the sensible choice at 20nm from a design point of view because of variability problems with gate-first processes.
TSMC updates reference flows for 20nm and CoWoS
TSMC has released two reference flows – one for its 20nm and the other for the form of 3D integration favored by the Taiwanese foundry, chip on wafer on substrate (CoWoS).
IEF: Process kits for processes that don’t yet exist
Designers should plan ahead for future process changes as conventional silicon CMOS runs out of steam, IMEC's Rudy Lauwereins told delegates at the International Electronics Forum in Bratislava this week.
IEF: “Industry will have to cooperate”
The semiconductor industry is reaching a crunch point at which companies that form it have to work together much more closely, says Malcolm Penn of Future Horizons.