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Seattle - A startup founded by EDA industry icon Carver Mead has developed a process for recharacterizing CMOS transistors after they've been fabricated. Impinj Inc. is betting the process will […]

Ithaca, N.Y. - Cornell University researchers have discovered yet another method for shrinking the design rules on silicon chips. The researchers demonstrated the technique, called controlled etching of dislocations (CED), […]

Palo Alto, Calif. - New approaches that may radically change chip-design tools and methodologies were advanced by researchers at the December annual review of the Gigascale Silicon Research Center here. […]

The market for "wireless connectivity" is one of the fastest-growing ones in history. This is due to the enormous number of potential applications in communications infrastructure, in industrial and business […]

Bluetooth is widely predicted to become the ubiquitous wireless connection that links every type of electronic device-from mobile phones to PCs to personal digital assistants (PDAs) to vending machines. Where […]

The dramatic rise in the use of microwave technologies, generated by wireless communications growth, has created challenges for interconnect and packaging techniques. Though most wireless equipment has used conventional pc-board […]

Kyoto, Japan - As semiconductor densities soar, engineers are challenged to perfect the very-large-scale circuitry needed to fully utilize gigabit systems. One solution to the problem would be to "evolve" […]

Increasing design complexity, cost and processing time is driving the need for an economical, fast prototype-to-production technology for system-on-a- chip (SOC) designs. Designers are under tremendous pressure to deliver working […]

Los Angeles - Micromachine technology could get a boost from a breakthrough electrochemical process invented here at the University of Southern California's Information Science Institute. A team lead by physicist […]

This week's announcement of Blast Fusion from Magma Design Automation (see story, page 51) brings to four the number of recent startups promising revolutionary approaches to IC physical design. All […]

You'll probably recall how the critics of end-to-end ATM switching often complained of the "forklifts" needed to bring ATM to the desktop. Because ATM proponents failed to consider the ubiquity […]

While advances in semiconductor fabrication technology have always been roughly measured in circuit density, the current stir over system-on-a-chip (SOC) capability marks a significant change in industry metrics. Rather than […]

Until fairly recently, the ASIC and programmable-logic industries have been characterized by continual introductions of ever-larger "blank slate" devices. In other words, vendors placed the burden of system-level design on […]

With the arrival of silicon compilation, hardware design has become as fluid as software design. In fact, they have become almost indistinguishable, at least in terms of the design processes. […]

It is deja vu once again for the embedded systems industry, but there's a big difference this time. Now, instead of an integrated development environment that ties all aspects of […]

Strides in system-on-chip design are compelling the semiconductor and EDA industries to overhaul design methodologies, tools and even business and legal models as engineers struggle to shrink the contents of […]

Bend, Ore. - Efforts to integrate acoustic-wave resonators into silicon and gallium arsenide circuits promise to widen the design window for wireless-system integrators by offering essential filtering functions in versatile, […]

An odd thing has been happening as vendors scramble to come up with cost-effective MPEG video decoders. The lines-always a little vague-between CPU firmware, programmable logic and fixed-function hardware are […]

Sendai, Japan--As VLSI designers contemplate the move from 5-V to 3-V levels required by smaller design rules, they might find current-mode logic (CML) an attractive alternative. By representing logic levels […]