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 […]
Look at what is supposed to be a stellar-performing market: displays. According to data from the Consumer Electronics Association, large screen plasma and LCDs are flying out of the stores.Yet the major suppliers spent much of Q4 2006 getting seriously beaten up on price. Moreover, the likelihood of a third technology entering that market, SED […]
Leakage has become a critical concern for sub-100nm silicon process technologies. It had started to become a significant factor in a chip’s overall power profile at 130nm, but by 90nm things had worsened with leakage accounting for perhaps 30% of a chip’s total power consumption. At 65nm, leakage represents more than 50% of power consumption. […]
The use of poly-Si TFTs for active matrix OLEDs (AMOLEDs) allows peripheral circuits to be integrated on a glass substrate at low cost and reduces the number of external driver ICs. The prospect of such integration means it is likely that emerging system-on-glass (SOG) design projects will feature both analog and digital blocks, such as […]
PCI Express is a point-to-point communications interface. It is neither an evolved nor enhanced form of PCI or PCI-X, but, essentially, a high speed, low voltage, differential serial pathway for communication between two devices, although it uses the same programming model as its predecessors. It employs a protocol that allows devices to communicate simultaneously by […]
Timing closure is one of the major problems faced by SoC designers. The inclusion of several, often diverse, IP cores that need to communicate with each other on a chip makes it difficult for a designer to meet the complex timing requirements between these cores. Furthermore, as process nodes shrink, process variability becomes a more […]
Simple question. But it’s one aimed specifically at the designers. In the last five years, have you ever been to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas – or, indeed, any of its international equivalents like CeBit in Hanover? The IDMs – Sony, Toshiba, IBM et al – will have hundreds of people at these […]
Applications ranging from gaming to digital media to data analytics continue to grow more complex and constantly demand increasing computing power from computer systems. Historic growth in microprocessor performance has primarily been responsible for assuring a steady growth in the computing power of computer systems. Traditionally, this growing performance has been sustained by scaling down […]
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 […]
