We are now entering the tail end of an era, and many of us do not even know it. For as long as there have been microprocessors, there have been engineers and engineering teams whose job it was to create interconnects. Although this will undoubtedly continue in some companies, the increasing complexity of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) […]
How do we bridge the gap between the highly abstract view provided by traditional system-level design and the detailed implementation in RTL? The article answers this question by describing the components within an ESL methodology and illustrating its use via customer case studies. The methodology uses the ARM RealView SoC Designer tool and Tenison Design […]
There has been a recent trend for tools originally aimed at ASIC designs to be applied to the design of high-volume projects aimed at markets such as consumer electronics. The article argues that there are a number of fundamental flaws in such a strategy. For example, an ASIC tool might be designed for an environment […]
Until recently, hierarchical design flows have been favored for the implementation of multi-million gate SOCs. However the rapid increases in design size brought on by nanometer process geometries have seen engineers seek to cope with the inherently block-based nature of such flows by seeking greater concurrency between the block implementation and chip assembly stages in […]
US factory-to-dealer sales of consumer electronics will surpass $155B in 2007, representing 7% growth, according to the most recent forecast from the Consumer Electronics Association. This performance will follow on from an expected $145B market in 2006, a year which surpassed even the most optimistic forecasts by logging growth of 13%. “The industry outlook is […]
DATE 07 (April 16-20) marks an important milestone for the Design Automation and Test in Europe conference as it reaches its tenth edition. As we went to press, the main technical program was still being finalized, but DATE has again received record submissions, 933 against last year’s 834. The most obvious change in 2007 is […]
There is a growing productivity gap in the design of embedded systems. One recent survey estimated that the number of lines of embedded code written per year is growing at a rate of 46% a year, although the number of developers available to write it is growing at only 7.5%. The problem is further compounded […]
What do we mean by a ‘left shift’ in design for manufacturing (DFM) analysis? Think of it as moving the DFM analysis from a tool run by the manufacturer into an integrated solution within the printed circuit board (PCB) design system. It is a major advance in the design of PCBs, allowing users to ultimately […]
In late 2001, Nick Baker and other members of the Ultimate TV team at Microsoft learned that the company was ending development work on the product. For a still youthful engineer whose curriculum vitae already took in some ill-fated early-days video card work at Apple and the short-lived 3DO games console, Baker could have been […]
Consumer electronics is a difficult business.Market windows open and close quickly. Cost is critical. Requirements change unpredictably. Risk is high. Functionality and performance increase with every product generation, while both manufacturing-limitations and feature-driven demand require low power implementations. Of all these, power constraints have the largest impact on current product architectures. As CMOS reaches its […]
