Community

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Lou Ternullo discusses DDR subsystems and their effect on latency.

https://youtu.be/7CiPHHhlj-U

One of the best, most insightful (no pun intended) conferences each year is the Embedded Vision Summit, May 12, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, not far from Cadence’s HQ offices. If you want to incorporate visual intelligence into your products, you need to go to this conference. Hot topics include convolutional neural networks, image recognition, image search, 3D vision, specialized vision processors, standards…

Consumer demand for entertainment and communication is changing the architecture of your electronic devices. And Cadence is providing key IPs necessary for SoC developers to quickly bring their products to market. Today Cadence is unveiling its first-silicon results for both DDR4 and LPDDR4 IP on TSMC's 16nm FinFET Plus (16FF+) process, with test chips operating at 3200Mbps. This speed can support the computation requirements…

With more than 100 presentations, live product demos, designer expo, and numerous engaging technology discussions, CDNLive Silicon Valley 2015 was a networking opportunity worth joining. And since conference proceedings from all 10 technical tracks are now available online, we wanted to share with you once more all the inspiring design, verification and processor IP presentations in this year’s IP track.

Best…

Many of today’s SoCs are built around multi-layered, sophisticated interconnect IP components that link together multiple processor cores, caches, memories, and dozens of other IP blocks. These interconnects are enabling new generations of low-power servers and high-performance mobile devices. However, sophisticated interconnects have to be highly configurable, which creates unique challenges for SoC integrators and verification…

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Susan Peterson takes a closer look at protocol standards and what to look for when adopting these technologies.

https://youtu.be/imzeUlFBsqc

With the 16.6 Allegro PCB Editor release, custom text can now be specified for any dimension value using the optional Text field located in the Options Panel. If the entered text is specified in the Text field, it will override any computed or specified entries in the Value field. You can also use the following format strings in the Text field:

• %v when entered in the text field will be substituted by the computed dimension…

If you’ve never heard of the Linley Mobile Conference, you’ve been missing out on one of the most influential conferences for design innovation for next-generation mobile devices.

Registration is now open for the Linley Mobile Conference, April 22-23, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Clara, CA. And you’re going to want to attend.

Just read the show’s description:

Innovation in mobile chip…

1. Cadence Online Support has a sleek new design along with support for iPAD and Android tablet (7" and above).   Find out what's new. (Note: Some users are experiencing display issues in Chrome version 41 and 42. Cadence is working to find a resolution. If you experience this, we suggest you use IE or Firefox until a fix for Chrome is identified.)

2. Design Rule Driven (DRD) Editing and DRD…

When designing next-generation products, the common theme is "faster, smaller, cheaper".  When that is combined with longer battery life and lower power consumption requirements, the design challenges can be daunting.  And one thing you know for sure, the project schedule is not going to be extended to allow you to overcome all these challenges.

It certainly makes sense that every electronic product designer…

Switched Mode Power Supplies (SMPS) are used extensively in most of the power conversion processes due to their efficiency and compactness. The analysis, design, and the modeling processes have all grown in the past four decades. Most of these developments were centered on hard-switching converters where the switching frequency was limited to a few KHz. The present direction of evolution in SMPS is towards high efficiency…

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, YJ Patil discusses the challenges of LPDDR4 IP verification when designing high-speed, low-power memory for mobile SoCs.

https://youtu.be/bPobqXqZq9M

What’s the biggest conference for everything related to memories? If you answered MemCon, you’d be right.

MemCon 2015 is on Tuesday, October 13, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The call for papers just opened, so it’s time to think about how you can further your career and showcase your understanding of key memory technologies.

See the full list of suggested topics, but here are some of…

BARCELONA, Spain—We hear a lot about sensor fusion and the applications that it can enable. But conquering the technical hurdles while keeping your project on budget is non-trivial.

“What you’re going to see is that with a solid sensor fusion output, people are going to be building newer and better applications, like incorporating pedestrian dead reckoning with satellite GNSS information to get better tracking…

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Bob Salem explains WiGig (IEEE 802.11ad), the next-generation wireless communication interface. Bob details how applications including entertainment, small office, small corporate groups, and hotspots all benefit from this powerful, wireless interface.

https://youtu.be/eT1sT4Y_FjQ

With the 16.6 Allegro PCB Editor release, a simplified method to highlight or de-highlight all nets associated with a component is offered in all applications modes. Hover over a symbol(s), then use the RMB to access the ‘Highlight Associated Nets’ command. Nets assigned the DC Voltage property are ignored.

Here are the steps to accomplish highlighting nets:

1. Using any one of the application modes, hover…

Link training is the first stepping stone to enabling the communication channel between source and sink devices. This is where the electrical characteristics of the link along with the bitrate are fixed, and are subsequently used for the data transfers...

On March 18, Cadence and ARM announced a groundbreaking deal that provides reciprocal access to relevant IP portfolios from the Cadence IP Group and ARM. The agreement grants both companies rights to manufacture test chips containing Cadence IP and ARM IP and to provide development platforms to customers. I sat down with Martin Lund, Senior Vice President of Cadence’s IP Group, to talk about the deal.

Q: What’s…

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Chris Rowen talks about techniques for optimizing power in sensor-based IoT devices and always-on subsystems.

BARCELONA, Spain—Mobile World Congress is not surprisingly focused on mobile devices, applications, and services. And the Cadence Tensilica team, which has been attending this event for a decade, generally has something up its sleeves when the booth opens for business each year.

This time was no exception. The company announced that DTS’s Headphone:X immersive sound technology has been optimized for the Cadence…

In this week's Whiteboard Wednesdays video, Sandeep Brahmadathan talks about the latest enhancements of PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 4 and how these enhancements address the goals of increased bandwidth while maintaining software compatibility and keeping power consumption and implementation costs down.

http://youtu.be/Keh-utK5YKo

Just as IP components offload design effort, verification IP (VIP) components offload verification effort. VIP components are used to monitor traffic and substitute for selected master and slave components to enable controlled stimulus generation and coverage collection within an SoC design. To be effective in verifying CHI-based designs, the VIP must deliver three major capabilities. They are:

1. Stimulus generation…

BARCELONA, Spain—In the past decade, immense change has come to mobile electronic system design. Steve Roddy should know. He’s had a ringside seat to those changes—and Mobile World Congress—for years.

Roddy, senior group director for Tensilica marketing, said during MWC 2015 that system design is a much different challenge than it was a decade ago. (Tensilica, which Cadence acquired in 2013, has…