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Brian Bailey of Semiconductor Engineering observes that systems on chip have been manufactured with numerous processing variants ranging from general-purpose CPUs to DSPs, GPUs and custom processors which are highly optimized for certain tasks.

“When none of these options provide the necessary performance or consumes too much power, custom hardware takes over. But there is one type of processing element that has rarely been used in a major SoC— the FPGA,” he explained. “Solutions implemented in FPGAs are often faster than any of the instruction-set processors. In most cases they complete a computation with lower total energy consumption.”

Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel recently curated a Silicon Valley Executive Network (SVEN) event that convened at Accenture’s Redwood Shores Liquid Studio to explore how design thinking can create a truly competitive advantage.

Nadel, who has a background in psychology and scientific research, as well as experience in both design and marketing, opened the conference by noting that design-led marketing is characterized by a logical sequence and cadence.

“Marketing should start upstream during the strategy and ideation stage and continue during prototyping, launch and downstream promotion,” he explained. “Understanding user experience (UX) is especially critical because UX and marketing are inexorably interrelated. The connection between UX and product marketing was reinforced with the Design Council’s Double Diamond, diagraming that both focus on designing (or developing) the right thing and designing things right.”