January 2015 - Page 2 of 10 - Semiconductor Engineering


A Bird’s Eye View


We are living in the age of pictures. Just about any event or non-event in our life is being captured in a picture. Even more so, a lot of those pictures are being shared with others. It offers us a way to share a moment with the ones who weren’t there. Living with my wife and children in Silicon Valley, far away from our family in Belgium, it provides us with a way to show what we are up to ... » read more

Speeding Up Timing Constraint Creation, Refinement And Validation


We are dealing with designs integrating many features and working with cutting-edge process technologies. Design methodologies and the design and process complexities can be overwhelming. To leverage the advancements in EDA tools and to achieve optimal power, performance and area results while overcoming design complexities, it is important to have a qualitative timing constraint file that c... » read more

Darker Silicon


For the last several decades, integrated circuit manufacturers have focused their efforts on [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"], increasing transistor density at constant cost. For much of that time, Dennard’s Law also held: As the dimensions of a device go down, so does power consumption. Smaller transistors ran faster, used less power, and cost less. As most readers already know, howe... » read more

Simulation Performance Driven By Model Efficiency


In real estate it’s all about location, location, location. For system level simulation it’s all about performance, performance, performance. I have heard many opinions on the performance of SystemC and TLM simulations: some positive, some negative, much of the opinion based on hearsay or other unreliable information. I believe the performance of the simulation is mainly driven by the model... » read more

Tech Talk: Formal Discussion


Pratik Mahajan, senior R&D manager for verification at Synopsys, talks about how to use simulation plus formal verification. [youtube vid=TjO8up0nPGg] » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 28


Mentor Graphics' John Day points to the growing presence of automakers in Silicon Valley. The latest émigré is Ford, which is setting up a research and innovation center in Palo Alto, but the company is hardly alone. Electronics could well become the real differentiators in vehicles. ARM's Andrew Sloss points to an intriguing relationship between data and economic growth—not to mention m... » read more

A Complete Analog Design Flow For Verification Planning And Requirement Tracking


Verifying designs to meet all specifications across all process corners has become an intractable problem from the perspective of debugging, managing, tracking, and meeting verification goals. Implementing a CDV methodology for analog designs can evolve analog design and verification to a standard process-based method that can be tracked and its progress measured. This paper aims to extend comm... » read more

Solving The ASIC Prototype Partition Problem With Synopsys ProtoCompiler


When developing a multi-FPGA prototype of an ASIC or SoC, you have many decisions to make: how to distribute clocks; where to put the daughter boards with real-world interfaces; which modules should be assigned to each FPGA; where and how many cables connect the FPGAs; and how to squeeze all the signals into those cables. All these decisions need to result in the fastest possible prototype that... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 27


Optimizing algorithms Optimization algorithms try to find the minimum values of mathematical functions, and are everywhere in engineering for such things as evaluating design tradeoffs, assessing control systems, finding patterns in data, among other things. A way to solve a difficult optimization problem is to first reduce it to a related but much simpler problem, then gradually add complexit... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 27


Improving batteries By digging into the complex science behind the formation of dendrites that cause lithium-ion batteries to fail, research by Purdue University engineers could bring safer, longer-lasting batteries capable of being charged within minutes instead of hours. According to the researchers, dendrites form on anode electrodes and may continue to grow until causing an internal sho... » read more

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