D&R Industry Articles (January 2009)

Featured Article

Identifying IP cores -- to protect your investment

In this paper, Semiconductor Insights shows some noble ways of identifying IP cores from any SoC products to protect the interest of IP core providers. Techniques developed by Semiconductor Insights to identify IP core blocks include methods such as circuit extraction using advanced delayering techniques, layout comparisons, automatic recognition and extraction of standard cells and blocks of designs, netlist generation from the extracted circuits, use of circuit library to identify IP blocks, use of structural data mining algorithm for netlist comparison, and device and system level testing to identify IPs involving algorithms and system level protocols.

Featured Article

The Value of High Quality IP-XACT XML

As the semiconductor industry increases take-up of IP-XACT standards to describe Intellectual Property (IP) this paper shares the experiences of NXP Semiconductors and Mentor Graphics, who have been using and developing this technology together for over five years. This paper describes the benefits of adopting IP-XACT and highlights the importance of producing high quality component XML as the foundation of a successful IP-XACT reuse strategy.

Featured Article

Inductorless versus Inductor-Based Integrated Switching Regulators: Bill Of Material, Efficiency, Noise, and Reliability Comparisons

Inductor-based Switching Regulators (SR) have historically represented the preferred architecture for power supplies. Nowadays, for low-power and highly integrated electronic systems, embedded inductor-based SRs show several limitations that can be overcome by the use of inductorless SR architectures. This paper provides a qualitative and quantitative comparison between both types of SR in terms of implementation cost (Bill of Material, and pin count), and performance (efficiency, noise, and reliability).