March 2010

The embedded world Exhibition & Conference remains one of the industry’s most vibrant gatherings.

A greater proportion of the layout requires more precise extraction at the 32nm and 28nm process nodes, so rules-based extraction tools can no longer deliver the accuracy needed to confirm acceptable electrical performance. Given the nature of parasitic elements in analog and mixed-signal (AMS) system-on-chip designs, designers need a parasitic extraction tool that provides gate-level, [...]

A team from RFMD describes a design upgrade for one of the company’s devices, the ML5800 transceiver. The chip is used in cordless telephones and has sold more than 20 million units. Because of constraints upon the different portions of the project and a wish to maximize reuse from the earlier chip, the company developed [...]

STMicroelectronics in Greater Noida, India recently completed an Omega2 set-top-box decoder IC targeted at HDTV markets. This article discusses how ST used Mentor Graphics’ Olympus-SoC software to address the closure challenges presented by a very large design. It describes how the design team used the tool suite’s chip assembly, concurrent multi-corner multi-mode (MCMM) analysis and [...]

One year after the publication of a draft, the analog and mixed-signal (AMS) extensions to SystemC AMS will be issued as a standard at the Design Automation and Test in Europe conference in Dresden in March 2010. At this point, SystemC/SystemC AMS will become the first ESL technology to cover continuous time modeling as well [...]

The USB 3.0 specification was approved in 2008 and the first certified products to take advantage of its SuperSpeed (5Gbit/s) were launched at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. As more support for the standard becomes available, engineers will find themselves considering the specification’s implementation on all types of system projects during the course [...]

Will CES 2010 ultimately be remembered for marking the point where Asia began to drive consumer electronics? Paul Dempsey reports.

For the first time in four decades, a new book goes inside the Defense Department’s cutting-edge research agency DARPA.

Europe’s premier EDA conference moves to Silicon Saxony

Imagination Technologies creates and licenses semiconductor intellectual property (IP) processor cores for graphics, video, multi-threaded embedded processing/DSP and multi-standard communications applications. These products are complemented by software tools and drivers as well as developer and middleware ecosystems. The company recently embarked on the development of an advanced system-on-chip for one of its customers that could [...]