System designs have traditionally achieved reliability through redundancy, even though this inevitably increases component count, logic size, system power and cost. The article describes the design separation feature in Altera software that seeks to address these as well as today’s conflicting needs for low power, small size and high functionality while maintaining high reliability and […]
To the world at large, Junot Diaz is well on the way to becoming a literary superstar. His novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has already earned critical superlatives and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. And deservedly so. It is a fabulous, accessible book, expressed in language that—when you buy a copy […]
For two decades, the benefits of ESL and abstractions have been supposedly confined to engineers working on digital designs and to system architects. Analog and mixed-signal (AMS) design has largely remained a ‘circuit level’ activity. This article shows that tools exist that now also allow AMS engineers to exploit abstraction, and that can make all […]
The paper presents a fully parallel transistor-level full-chip circuit simulation tool with SPICE accuracy for general circuit designs. The proposed overlapping domain decomposition approach partitions the circuit into a linear subdomain and multiple nonlinear subdomains based on circuit nonlinearity and connectivity. A parallel iterative matrix solver is used to solve the linear domain while nonlinear […]
An overview of antenna design considerations is presented. These considerations include system requirements, antenna selection, antenna placement, antenna element design/simulation and antenna measurements. A center-fed dipole antenna is presented as a design/simulation example. A measurement discussion includes reflection parameter measurements and directive gain measurements. Antenna requirements Gain and communication range With the advent of prolific […]
Our preview of the forthcoming Design Automation Conference concentrates on the User Track that makes its debut there next month. Given that it shares many of the objectives behind this journal, that is hardly surprising. However, it is not the only aspect of DAC that merits investigation. Also in the program, conference chair Dr. Andrew […]
The article describes how a methodology based around scalable transaction level modeling (TLM) techniques can be used to enable software design to begin far earlier in a design fl ow and thus allow companies to bring designs to market faster, particularly in time-sensitive sectors. It is based on the creation of high-level hardware models that […]
Circuit noise problems can originate from a variety of sources. By carefully examining attributes of the offending noise you can identify it’s source, thereby making noise reduction solutions become more apparent. There are three subcategories of noise problems: device, conducted and radiated noise. If an active or passive device is the major noise contributor, you […]
New separation kernels and embedded hypervisors can help ease the pain of migrating legacy systems to new hardware platforms, including multicore processing systems. Bringing multiple OSs and applications on to the same hardware also opens up new possibilities for combining systems that offer real-time performance within a familiar GUI environment. The LynxSecure separation kernel and […]
The article presents the context for the use of computation scaling (CS) to eke out more from existing lithography tools until next-generation techniques are finally introduced. It discusses the critical elements in the CS ecosystem developed by IBM and partners to overcome roadblocks to optical scaling that demand the use of non-traditional techniques for the […]
