New Atom series solutions which include AMB-D255T1Mini-ITX industrial mainboard and AMB-N280S1 fanless 3.5-inch single board computer. AMB-D255T1 is equipped with an Intel D2550 Atom processor. AMB-N280S1 is equipped with an Intel N2800 Atom. Both have a 5~7 year product warranty.
This seems to be the year for milestone events in the EDA industry,
though calculations show some of the “anniversary” designations to be
premature. Nevertheless, the first big EDA event of the year is the
Design and Verification Conference (DVCon),
held in San Jose, CA every February. DVCon celebrated its 10th
anniversary this year, after a transformation from HDLcon in 2003, which
followed the earlier union of theVHDLInternational User’s Forum and InternationalVerilogHDL Conference. Those predecessor conferences trace their origins back 25 years and 20 years, respectively.
After DVCon, EDA marketers quickly turn to preparations for the JuneDesign Automation Conference(DAC), perhaps with a warm-up at Design, Automation, andTestin
Europe (DATE) in March. DAC is the big show, however, and this year
marks the 50th such event (and its 49th anniversary). Phil Kaufman Award
winner Pat Pistilli received the EDA industry’s’ highest honor for his
pioneer work in creating DAC, which grew from his amusingly-named
Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort (SHARE) conference in 1964.
Milestones
inevitably lead to some reflection, but also provide an opportunity to
look forward to what the future will bring. In our 2nd annual EDA Digest
Resource Guide, we will be asking EDA companies to share what they see
as the biggest challenges facing the industry in the next five years,
and how the industry will change to meet those challenges. Will future
innovations be able to match the impact of the greatest past
developments in EDA, which enabled the advances in electronics that we
benefit from today?
To put that question in perspective, I’ve been developing a Top 10 list of the most significant developments in the history of EDA, based on my personal experiences over the course of my career. That doesn’t go back quite as far as Pat Pistilli’s, but I have seen many of the major developments in EDA first hand, going back to when I started as an IC designer at Texas Instruments. (This was a few years after we stopped cutting rubylith, in case you were wondering.)
We will also be conducting asurveyof readers, and will publish the results in the EDA Digest Resource guide in time for DAC-50. To get things started, here are the first five EDA breakthroughs on my list, roughly in historical order.
MicroMax announced today it is exhibiting its M-Max 810 PR/MS3, an ATR-based system for avionics, at Embedded World 2013 in Nuremberg.
Sam Abarbanel, President of MicroMax, stated “Our newest addition to the M-Max line of rugged computers demonstrates MicroMax’s excellence at building tough machines for harsh environments. Our unique fully sealed fanless ATRenclosure is especially designed to house PC/104 form-factor boards. We proudly demonstrate this system at Embedded World as yet another example of our quality engineering and manufacturing abilities.” ........
As
the role of the mobile device continues to evolve, chip designers will face
increased pressure to create processors that can handle next-generation
computing. Designers need to look beyond single-core solutions to deliver
powerful, energy-efficient processors that allow for the "always on, always
connected" experience consumers want.
Mobile usage has changed significantly, with today’s
consumers increasingly using their smartphones for the majority of the
activities in their connected lives. This includes high-performance tasks such
as Web browsing, navigation and gaming, and less demanding background tasks such
as voice calls, social networking, and e-mail services. As a result, the mobile
phone has become an indispensible computing device for many consumers.
At the same time, new mobile form factors such as tablets are
redefining computing platforms in response to consumer demand. This is creating
new ways for consumers to interact with content and bringing what was once only
possible on a tethered device to the mobile world. What we’re seeing is truly
next-generation computing.
As with any technology shift, designers must consider several
factors to address the changing landscape, but in this case, a few issues stand
out more than the rest as trends that will define where mobility is going.
Increased data
Consumers today desire an on-demand computing experience that
entails having data available at the ready anytime. Gone are the days when
consumers owned smartphones for the sole purpose of making phone calls. They now
require a rich user experience allowing them to access documents, e-mail,
pictures, video, and more on their mobile devices. Combined with the more than
37 billion applications already downloaded, data consumption continues to rise.
According to a recent Cisco report, global mobile data traffic from 2011 and
2016 will grow to 10.8 exabytes (1 billion gigabytes) per month, and by 2016,
video is expected to comprise 71 percent of all mobile data traffic.
Battery life
Mobile computing has always required a balance of performance
and power consumption. The combination of smaller form factors and consumers
demanding more out of their devices has led chip designers to develop ways
around the power/performance gap. Without cutting power altogether, designers
turn to techniques like clock scaling, where processor speeds vary based on the
intensity of a task. Designers have also reverted to dual- and quad-core
processors that decrease power while still delivering performance. As consumers
continue to trend toward an “always on, always connected” experience, processors
must become more powerful and more energy efficient.
Connectivity
The way consumers use computing devices is drastically
changing, as their primary computing devices are no longer stationary, but
carried around in their pockets, bags, and purses. The number of mobile
connected devices will exceed the world’s population in 2012, according to
industry studies. By 2016 there will be more than 10 billion mobile Internet
connections around the world, with 8 billion of them being personal devices and
2 billion Machine-to-Machine (M2M) connections.
Implications for chips
So where is Moore’s Law going to take the embedded industry
with this mobile revolution? History predicts a doubling every 18 months from
thousands to billions of transistors, but actually looking at the performance of
a single processor shows that it has all but stalled because the amount of power
that can be consumed in the system has peaked.
For any single processor in the future, heat dissipation will limit any significant
increase in speed. Once a device hits its thermal barrier, it will simply melt,
or in the case of a mobile phone, start to burn the user. Apart from the
physical aspects of heat dissipation, it is also hugely power inefficient. The
amount of power it takes to tweak a processor to perform faster and faster
becomes exponential, and the last little bit is especially expensive. Whereas in
the past, double the size meant double the speed, double the size now equates to
just a small percentage faster. That’s one of the reasons why designers have hit
a limit for single-core systems.
Solving the power problem
If designers can’t make a single core go faster, the number
of individual cores has to increase. This brings the benefit of being able to
match each core to the demands being placed on it.
ARM’s big.LITTLE processing extends consumers’ “always on,
always connected” mobile experience with up to double the performance and 3x the
energy savings of existing designs. It achieves this by grouping a “big” multicore
processor with a “little” multicore processor and seamlessly selecting the right
processor for the right task based on performance requirements. This dynamic
selection is transparent to the application software or middleware running on the processors.
The first generation of big.LITTLE design (see Figure 1)
combines a high-performance Cortex-A15 multiprocessor cluster with a Cortex-A7
multiprocessor cluster offering up to 4x the energy efficiency of current
designs. These processors are 100 percent architecturally compatible and have
the same functionality, including support for more than 4 GB of memory, virtualizationextensions, and functional units such as NEON advanced Single Instruction,
Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions for efficient multimedia processing and
floating-point support. This allows software applications compiled for one
processor type to run on the other without modification. Because the same
application can run on a Cortex-A7 or a Cortex-A15 without modification, this
opens the possibility to map application tasks to the right processor on an
opportunistic basis.
Figure 1: ARM’s big.LITTLE processing combines
the high performance of the Cortex-A15
multiprocessor with the energy efficiency of the Cortex-A7 multiprocessor and
enables the same application software to switch seamlessly between
them.
(Click graphic to zoom by
1.9x)
As we continue to usher in this new era of computing, mobile
phone designers will find themselves focusing on how to deliver devices that
allow for increased data consumption, connectivity, and battery life. ARM’s
big.LITTLE processing addresses the challenge of designing a System-on-Chip (SoC) capable of delivering both the highest
performance and the highest energy efficiency possible within a single processor
subsystem. This coupled design opens up the poten-tial for a multitude of new
applications and use cases by enabling optimal distribution of the load between
big and LITTLE cores and by matching compute capacity to workloads.
