June 1, 2006
As the third wave of the digital revolution finally gains momentum, the chip industry is breaking loose from its homogeneous telecom/PC-centric confines – where everyone’s product and box essentially looked and worked the same – into the arms of the fragmented consumer-centric heterogeneous multimedia, with significantly more brand names and lots of different price points. […]
June 1, 2006
Walden Rhines The official mission statement of the EDA Consortium (EDAC) says that the organization exists “to promote the health of the EDA industry, and to increase awareness of the crucial role EDA plays in today’s global economy.” EDAC’s chairman Wally Rhines, also chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, amplifies this by explaining that the […]
June 1, 2006
Kerry Bernstein When Kerry Bernstein, a 28-year IBM veteran, was first drafted to work on Big Blue’s development of 3D semiconductors, he admits he was a skeptic. “At first, I think I felt as though I’d got dragged into this program. I thought it wasn’t going anywhere. I thought it was going to go anywhere. […]
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June 1, 2006
Joe Costello The dominant theme for DAC 2006 is multimedia, games and entertainment. So how does Cadence Design Systems founder and former CEO Joe Costello fit into that? He is after all giving the conference’s Monday keynote. Let’s do the ticklist. EDA credentials? Dated – he left Cadence in 1998 – but basically a ‘check’. […]
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March 1, 2006
Introduction The emergence of the SystemVerilog and PSL assertion languages promises to improve the effectiveness of existing verification flows. First, assertions give better local observability of the functionality they represent. Second, the assertions augment the textual specification to provide a more formal, executable representation of the functionality. Third, since the assertion languages have common semantics […]
March 1, 2006
T he explosion in consumer electronics, especially in the wireless/handheld devices marketplace, has placed a tremendous technical and business burden on engineers in the design of these products. Design teams carry the responsibility of catering to often conflicting and always challenging product specifications. The product needs to be optimized on multiple demand vectors with little […]
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March 1, 2006
The advent of extreme fine line processes at 130nm or less presents many challenges. On the back end, optimizing a design to manage physical effects such as power, heat, and timing is more daunting than ever. At the front end, implementing a system-on-chip’s (SoC) behavior and features is becoming equally difficult. The early exploration of […]
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March 1, 2006
When microprocessor core developer ARM started in a barn outside Cambridge, England, just over fifteen years ago, odds were against it making a global impact. The team of “12 engineers and me”, as then CEO and now chairman Sir Robin Saxby puts it, “had no patents, a working prototype and £1.75m of cash.” Without the […]
March 1, 2006
Selecting the proper ADC can appear a formidable task. A direct approach is to go to the selection guides and parametric search engines. Enter the sampling rate, resolution, power supply voltage, and other properties. Click ‘find’. But can one approach the task with greater understanding — particularly of the main architectures — and get better […]
March 1, 2006
For peripheral card and system manufacturers, delivering low-latency high-performance computing solutions at affordable prices has been an insurmountable barrier. Although processor speeds and bandwidth have taken quantum leaps over the last decade, the last few inches between the adapter slot and system CPU represent a bottleneck that restricts the development of cost-effective high-performance computing solutions. […]
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