When engineers discuss the status and value of the Design Automation Conference (DAC), one topic tends to recur. Fairly or unfairly, the claim is that there has long been an inherent tension between DAC the technical conference and DAC the exhibition. In short, the technical conference has been seen as biased toward tool developers; the […]
This paper describes the main design components and methodology priorities for development of the Sensium system-on-chip for wireless body sensor networks. The device is targeted at vital-sign monitoring and related medical applications. The SoC integrates an ultra-low-power wireless ISM band transceiver, hardware MAC, microprocessor, I/O peripherals, memories, 10b delta-sigma, analog-to-digital converter and custom interfaces. The […]
Electronic system level (ESL) is typically defined as design above the register transfer level (RTL). When applied to hardware design, ESL is the process of describing hardware functionality at higher levels of abstraction to increase designer productivity and enable greater degrees of exploration. With ESL, hardware designers no longer spend most of their time designing […]
Justin Rattner will this year mark 35 years with Intel. His career with the technology giant has seen him collect numerous accolades, particularly for work in areas such as high performance computing (HPC). He was Intel’s first principal engineer and was its fourth member of staff to be named a fellow (he is today a […]
The Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference is a comparatively young event—it reached only its 11th edition this March. Nevertheless, it has now firmly established itself on the EDA calendar and this year significantly extended its scope to become the world’s most important electronic systems design automation conference. At the same time, it […]
Given present-day demands for environmentally friendly, renewable energy sources, solar energy is becoming increasingly attractive. However, while solar energy is free, non-polluting and, in practical terms, inexhaustible, there remain significant inefficiencies in capturing it. For example, solar panels are traditionally fixed and in this configuration cannot capture the maximum amount of sunlight during changing weather […]
The real objective of design for manufacturability (DFM) is to improve a product’s profitability and manufacturing predictability for its market window and unit volume by optimizing tradeoffs between design costs and manufacturing improvements according to a holistic, lifetime view of the product. Current DFM practice often falls far short of that goal. For instance, the […]
In his early days in the semiconductor industry, Morris Chang Morris Chang was one of the “non-Texans” to Texas Instruments and was a manager struggling with the question of how to get individual transistor yields to somewhere around three or even four per cent. One of his colleagues – another immigrant to the Lone Star […]
ARC International is one of the largest suppliers of configurable processor technology. It licenses patented configurable multimedia subsystems and CPU/DSP processors that are used to design differentiated products. They are optimized for use in systemson- chip (SoCs) that consume less power, are less expensive to produce and require protection from cloning. The ARC Energy PRO […]
The semiconductor industry faces increasing challenges in the design of complex systems-on-chip, and while some have sprung from new, only recently anticipated sources, others are, in fact, very familiar. Foremost among these are the interconnect delays caused by the increasing influence of parasitic networks. Parasitic inductance is also a growing concern. The causes of parasitic […]