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 […]
SystemVerilog, the standard that originated from Accellera and is now IEEE1800, is not just for Verilog users. VHDL users can also improve their design processes using its proven verification features. Anyone involved in systemon- chip (SoC) design may face a mixed-language environment and will appreciate being able to leverage SystemVerilog with the VHDL portions of […]
Cswitch’s CS90 Configurable Switch Array device has an interconnect structure, the dataCrossconnect network, that delivers bandwidth at 40- 100Gbps for packet-based applications. For packet handling tasks, the chip includes embedded configurable blocks, Configurable Packet Engines, that support functions such as frame parsing, CRC and hashing, and fast address look-ups, all at up to 1GHz. For […]