By Ed Sperling
ARM took a new tack in its war with Intel. The company is working on a Green Cloud Services project using the ARM architecture in conjunction with Nokia, IMEC, EPFL and the University of Cypress to create a 3D package with low-power processing. This is particularly interesting in light of gamers using Intel Atom-based servers.

Along the same power-saving lines, Actel introduced its power management solution for its SmartFusion mixed signal FPGA, complete with a reference design and a configurator for power sequencing and trimming. Given Actel’s focus on low power in its other chips, this isn’t all that surprising.

Also on the low-power front, Virage Logic introduced a big update of the open source GNU and Linux toolchains for its ARC processors, which will soon belong to Synopsys. That puts Synopsys firmly into the open source world, as well, with interesting implications.

Arteris joined forces with other EDA and IP vendors supporting TSMC Reference Flow 11, this time with network on chip interconnect IP. This is more like networking the industry on chip.

eSilicon will provide logistics services and production operations to Ember and Pixim. This is an interesting extension of supply chain expertise.

Mentor Graphics rolled out its commercial embedded Linux platform for Freescale, building on a strategic alliance the two had signed in April.

Mentor also won a couple deals with Mindtree for its Questa functional verification and with Autoliv for machine programming.

Both Synopsys and Cadence trumpeted successes with their products. Cadence global services enabled a 65nm TD-LTE baseband chip from Innofidei, a company with operations in Taiwan and Beijing. Synopsys, meanwhile, demonstrated interoperability between DesignWare IP for PCI Express 3.0. The company also awarded the Tenzing Norgay interoperability achievement award to IEEE-ISTO. We’re not sure what the famed Sherpa had to do with interoperability, but congrats.

Low-power radio stations in case of emergencies are becoming quite popular these days. Missouri City just bought one.
Apparently so are low-power WiFi spots, given the new round of funding that Ozmo just secured.

CNet just reviewed the battery life of laptop computers. What’s interesting is just how much the life of the battery drops off when companies go from 15-inch to 17-inch screens, while the difference on 13-inch vs. 15-inch screens is hardly noticeable.

On the research side, IMEC introduced a 4G radio that consumes as little as 40 milliwatts. That should make your smart phone last for substantially longer between charges.

By Ed Sperling

Doing Business In 3D
IMEC, the Belgian research house, and Synopsys have teamed up to create 3D vertically stacked chips. This topic has received a lot of attention of late, in large part because analog engineers are nearing open rebellion over the need to keep pushing their technology down each process node. A good analog process can last a decade or more, and just re-doing it to put it on the same chip doesn’t make sense.

The missing piece in all this is the through-silicon via, which has been under development for several years. The collaboration is aimed at speeding the development of TSVs and saving the design world from having to re-do everything at 28nm and 22nm. The thought of analog at 11nm is entirely too much to comprehend.

Greener Marines
Green is sort of a natural color for the U.S. Marines, but you don’t exactly associate Marines with green technology. As it turns out, though, battery life in war is critical. According to an announcement issued by the U.S. Marine Corps, “Reducing resupply needs also keeps Marines safer. Fewer trucks on the road decrease Marines’ exposure to the improvised explosive device and other dangers.”

At least part of the effort is on renewable energy at Marine bases. But experiments by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory are now fusing together off-the-shelf technology for renewable energy and lower energy consumption military equipment. The Laboratory, according to the release, “conducts concept-based experiments and integrates operational concepts with how the Corps operates and fights. Experiments coupled with other research improve the expeditionary warfighting capabilities of the Marine Corps today and far into the future.”

End Of The Roll?
Kimberly-Clark has been closely watching the printed electronics market, according to IDTechEx, a British consultancy working in this market. Kimberly-Clark, which makes a variety of paper-based products such as tissues, says that printed electronics would are very useful in controllable heating and electronic sensing. But there are still a couple of hurdles to work out. First, the price is too high. Second, most of the company’s products are disposable, which makes electronics “just not practical, safe or cost-effective.”

Imec and Holst Centre unveiled an analog-signal processor ASIC that reduces the overall power consumption of a heart activity signal monitor by five times. Key to the process is intelligent processing from an adaptive sampling scheme—slashing the amount of data that needs to be processed by the DSP and then transmitted by the radio.

This is one of the hidden benefits of Synopsys’ announced acquisitions of CoWare and VaST. The more you can control the software, the more you can control the overall efficiency of the entire system—particularly when it comes to a multicore system. The key is adding intelligence into the processing up front, which is where software prototyping comes into play. The amount of data in circuit design is exploding, but not all of it has to be processed at every step.

Imec wasn’t the only one looking at low-power medical devices. MIT is developing a series of self-powered sensors that harvest electricity from temperature differences in the body. Who needs batteries?

Broadcom introduced a new low-power chip that combines Bluetooth with FM and a GPS, as well as all the normal stuff you’d find in a smart phone. Most of the services in smart phones have been software-based. This should change the market—and potentially the amount of power necessary to make it work.

On the utilities side, Springsoft introduced a power-aware debug solution for verifying low-power chips that supports both UPF and CPF. Spanning rival formats is always an opportunity, particularly when companies use tools from more than one EDA vendor.

Ludo Deferm, VP of business development at IMEC, the Belgian research house, talks about changes ahead at future process nodes.