July, 7, 2014, IMEC Technology Forum, San Francisco—Bobby Bell from KLA-Tencor talked about the exponentially changing technologies underlying the next generations of semiconductor manufacturing. The economics of the industry are presenting rapidly rising costs and are driving further industry consolidation. The trend of lower costs per gate is no longer valid as the process technologies…
April 29, 2014, Ethernet Technology Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Gilles Garcia from Xilinx presented a case for a highly flexible infrastructure to meet the requirements for 400G. Ethernet services in the future. The number of system-level unknowns is the biggest driver. IP traffic is expected to increase by an order of magnitude in the next four…
April 30, 2014, Ethernet technology Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Trevor Hiatt from the Rapid IO organization and IDT described the recent developments in RapidIO that enable a low-latency fabric with Ethernet scale out. The combination of the two protocols provides an alternative to technologies such as SCSI and Fiber Channel in a network. Networking architectures are…
April 29, 2014, Ethernet Technology Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Joel Goergen from Cisco discussed the drives for increasing the data rates for next generation Ethernet systems. The ongoing trends have to be balanced with the constraints of physics and economics to be viable. System interconnect has moved from 20 Mbps in a 2kW chassis to 25…
April 16, 2014, Churchill club, Santa Clara, CA—Jim Walsh from Global Logic moderated a panel that addressed the need for “greatness” in engineering and design. Panelists included Catherine Courage from Citrix, Steve Johnson from Linked-In, Frederick Pferdt from Google, Larry Tesler from MINE, and Charles Warren from SalesForce. The term “great” has to be added…
April 2, 2014, EE Live Conference, San Jose, CA—Andrew “Bunnie” Huang talked about the changes in the industry and the growing openness of consumer systems. Embedded systems are benefiting from the increasing commoditization of the underlying hardware. In the earlier days of consumer electronics, in the 1930’s, products came with schematics, tuning specifications, and other…
March 26, 2014, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA—David Hilton from MotorCity Engineering showed how brand and style affect design in an automotive environment. Although the reference point is automobiles, the concepts are applicable to other areas. A car designer has to combine materials, engineering, and appropriate art to design a car. The design results…
February 10, 2014, ISSCC, San Francisco—Erik Heijne from CERN talked about how chips pave the road to the Higgs particle and the atto world beyond. Fundamental research on elementary constituents of matter need more sophisticated tools with greater performance and resolution. Researchers working in high energy physics are taking advantage of microelectronics trends for smaller,…
September 23, 2013, CICC, San Jose, CA—Greg Yeric from ARM talked about the conjunction of design and technology in the sub-20 nm nodes and the need to use end product metrics as a part of the technology choice. Technology scaling has been going on for a long time, and the Moore and Denard scaling tricks…