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As the oil and gas industry concentrates increasingly on drilling long horizontal laterals, the necessity for improvements in rig design becomes more apparent. When operating in areas with considerably less [...]

The forces converging on the telecom and networking businesses have their roots in the changing desires of end users, and changing traffic patterns reflect those desires. For home-computer users, the [...]

One of the responsibilities of board-level designers is to ensure that verification and failure-analysis engineers have adequate access to signals without resorting to drills, bed-of-nails testers, or focused ion beams. [...]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There are many reasons to consider outsourcing all or part of a chip design. Perhaps you are on a board-level-design team, and the correct approach to your new [...]

Super-speed USB (Universal Serial Bus) 3.0 sounds like a great idea. Just start with widely used, fast, and bulletproof USB 2.0 and graft in the PHY (physical-layer) interface from another [...]

In simpler times, FPGA power consumption was a simpler issue. In the traditional applications of high-capacity FPGAs, such as expensive network routers, telecommunications switching gear, and prototype boards for ASIC [...]

Today, most design managers depend on some sort of verification-coverage metrics to answer three primary questions, according to Mentor Graphics' chief verification scientist, Harry Foster: Where have I been, where [...]

It was a shimmering promise on the horizon: As SOCs (systems on chips) became more complex, we would simply move from RTL (register-transfer level) to the next-higher level of abstraction--what [...]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The SOC (system-on-chip) began life in the image of the board-level computers that preceded it: as a central processor that a CPU bus connected to local memory and [...]

The almost-mythological fourth generation of wireless service--4G--could be the fountainhead of an entirely new way of thinking about SOC (system-on-chip) architectures. Or it could drive a simple evolution of today's [...]

Wireless links are becoming ubiquitous in electronic systems. At high data rates demanding wireless connections, WiMax and 3G cellular dominate, whereas, at the other extreme, standards such as ZigBee and [...]

It is a well-publicized trend that HDTV (high-definition TV) is sweeping through the next generation of SoC (system-on-chip) platforms. SoCs for set-top boxes, television monitors, disk players, and--in the near [...]

Video is going handheld. Consumer-electronics manufacturers are rushing past handheld DVD players to compete against the Video iPod. Handheld receivers for the emerging DVB (digital-video-broadcast) standards are on everyone's drawing [...]

The easiest lesson to draw from the consumer-electronics market is that integration is everything. Mobile beats portable. Palmtop beats mobile, and shirt pocket trumps palmtop. Even in desktop devices, such [...]

Interior designer Ron Wilson has know the actress-singer Cher since they were both teenagers in Encino, CA. He has helped design all her homes, including an Italian?renaissance-style mansion in Malibu, CA. The 16,000-square-foot residence boasts hand-carved marble,?English tapestries and gothic mantelpieces from Mexico.?

Company crafts multi-user AM/FM/GIS to cover 25,000 mi of lines and facilities along 660-ft corridor Duke Energy Gas Transmission has completed one of the most extensive AM/FM/GIS deployments in the [...]

Santa Clara, Calif. - Very rapidly in recent months, the attention of the semiconductor industry has shifted from ATM on the desktop (one of last year's Next Big Things) to […]

Silicon technology will soon allow designers to put a complex system with millions of gates on a single chip. However, designing all those gates poses a formidable challenge. The answer, […]

The range of multimedia silicon available today is as diverse as the data streams handled by multimedia equipment. Chip vendors have attempted to offer solutions for everything from video-CD players […]

The memory demands of multimedia systems have frame-buffer designers beating the bushes for faster varieties of DRAMs. Many have abandoned conventional memories for such advanced solutions as synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) […]

When NeoMagic Corp. announced its revolutionary graphics-controller chip last month, it forced a simmering debate out of the back rooms of technical symposia and into the spotlight: Is it time […]

Half a dozen new dynamic-RAM variants, all armed to the teeth, are converging on one heretofore peaceful spot in the personal-computer architecture: the graphics frame buffer. The result is a […]

Santa Clara, Calif. -- With about $600 million to pump into venture companies this year, Intel Corp. has joined the major leagues of venture-capital firms. But the unique imperative that […]

In one of the fascinating ironies that always seem to spice up the engineering profession, more and more design teams in a wide range of embedded systems are revisiting the […]

The opening of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week will mark the first public appearance of one of the most controversial and misunderstood technologies yet to […]

By all signs, it seems like an obvious conclusion. If integrated circuits are growing to include more and more of the system, then IC design must be growing more and […]

Palo Alto, Calif. -- Much of the ninth annual Hot Chips Symposium here last week was given over to the search for parallelism. From intriguing speculations about the nature of […]

Mountain View, Calif. -- Architects laying out the coming generation of 3-D graphics engines and video-compression processors have an unprecedented new freedom. The 0.35-micron processes in which the parts will […]

As we near the end of the decade, we find ourselves in a cluster of anniversaries. Some are of currently used products; some reach back to the beginnings of electronics […]

Anaheim, Calif. - The issue of design reuse kept pushing its way into the foreground at the Design Automation Conference here recently, insinuating itself into debates as far afield as […]

Digital be damned! These days, for high-end audio . . . As process technology marches inexorably forward, DRAMs and microprocessors are ramping in 0.35-micron CMOS. ASICs and FPGAs are moving […]

Good grades posted by the vis and mmx extensions Sun Microsystems Ultrasparc CPU was remarkable on a number of counts. It was an advanced superscalar design, the equal of anything […]

Members of the programmable logic device (PLD) community moved in different directions in 1995. Some adopted new programming elements, with antifuse and flash technologies drawing a lot of attention. Others […]

When Intel Corp. announced its PentiumPro-the CPU formerly known as the P6-last October, the Santa Clara, Calif., company may have silenced forever the RISC disciples who have long prophesied doom […]

Sun sets on monolithic microprocessors; Action is shifting to CPU as a core embedded in an ASIC After 20 years of unchallenged dominance, the standalone microprocessor is coming to the […]

Cupertino, Calif--At a time when European electronics manufacturers in general seem to be languishing, the semiconductor group at Siemens Corp. has its engines revved, coming off a nearly 40-percent growth […]