August 19, 2015, Intel Developer Forum, San Francisco—Jason Ross described the design, architecture, and processing changes that enabled improved performance at lower power for the graphics engines in the latest Intel core processors. The changes reflect the changing environments for the commercial-grade parts. In the past, PCs and their graphics engines had the luxury of…
May 21, 2015, Imagination Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Tony King-Smith from Imagination talked about the long-term problems for security in embedded systems. The results of a breach can be very sinister and difficult to eradicate. Lately, the world has seen many new attack vectors like “heart bleed” and the IoT will have high consequences for consumers…
March 2015 – At an event held concurrently with the opening of the Nvidia GTC conference, the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HAS) Foundation, released their Version 1.0 Specification. The spec has three major components and is targeted to address the design and programming of mixed CPU and specialty processors (GPU, DSP, etc) systems. These computing systems…
February 24, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Jae-woo Im from Samsung related the efforts to make a small die, high performance, low power NAND chip. The design requires a V-NAND process, 3 bits per cell, and a 1-plane architecture to achieve a storage density higher than a HDD. The underlying architecture changed from the previous generation, going…
February 23, 2015, ISSCC, San Francisco—Sehat Sutardja from Marvell Semiconductor noted that SoC designs are getting too complicated due to the freezing of the underlying computer architectures. The future of design will have to change to allow for more innovation and flexibility for the end products. The costs of SoC mask sets are doubling with…
December 17 , 2014, IEDM, San Francisco—Tuo-Hung Hou from National Chiao Tung University presented a high-density 3D synaptic architecture based on self-rectifying Ta/TaOx/TiO2/Ti RRAM. The new configurations are potentially useful as energy- and cost-efficient neuromorphic computation hardware. Existing IT systems based on Si devices and von Neumann architecture suffer from the fundamental problems of device…
December 16, 2014, IEDM, Sn Francisco—Chih-Ming Hung from MediaTek talked about the changes in architectures to implement RF transceivers to minimize the effects of device variability and process variations. The added intelligence is still constrained by the need for some device matching and device level enhancements. The strong demand for high performance affordable handsets has…
October 11, 2014, Audio Engineering Society Convention, Los Angeles—The Open Control Architecture Alliance is releasing a new open source specification to allow greater control interoperability in digital audio systems. Three years in the making, the new standard follows the move of A-V workflows from analog to digital and an IT infrastructure. The other work on…
October 2, 2014, ArmTechCon, Santa Clara, CA—Kevin Shaw from Audience talked about the changes in architectures to enable easier integration of sensors into systems. An open sensor hub platform allows greater levels of abstraction of the sensors and better partitioning of the whole system. Systems architectures are evolving to add more sensors. The problem is…
September 15, 2014, Storage Developer Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Mario Blandini from HGST described the development of a software-defined disk drive that adds CPU and memory to the storage to move compute closer to the storage. This configuration allows for greater flexibility and the ability for apps to run storage directly rather than through a disk…