August 2017 - Page 3 of 12 - Semiconductor Engineering


Executive Insight: Aart de Geus


Aart de Geus, chairman and co-CEO of [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss machine learning and big data, the race toward autonomous vehicles, systems vs. chips, software vs. hardware, and the future of EDA. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The whole tech world is buzzing over data and how it gets used in areas such as... » read more

Traceability Matrices: Headache Or Real Value?


Traceability is becoming increasingly important in most engineering projects, if only on the grounds of ‘good practice,’ and it is specifically required for projects that have to meet safety standards such as DO-254 and ISO 26262. To provide traceability, you must maintain the relationships between all aspects of a project; from the system-level requirements through implementation and ve... » read more

Design And Verification For An Era Of A Trillion Devices


Scared or excited? When I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation whether the one trillion devices that Softbank’s CEO Masa-san predicted least year at ARM TechCon was possible, I realized that a trillion may be the low end of the range. For me, the geeky excitement about the potential technological progress and how to architect the Internet of Things (IoT) gets balanced very fast with concern... » read more

When Is Verification Complete?


Deciding when verification is done is becoming a much more difficult decision, prompting verification teams to increasingly rely on metrics rather than just the tests listed in the verification plan. This trend has been underway for the past couple of process nodes, but it takes time to spot trends and determine whether they are real or just aberrations. The Wilson Research Group conducts a ... » read more

Extracting Maximum Performance From Hardware


The Arm DS-5 Streamline performance analyzer provides system performance metrics, software tracing, and statistical profiling to help engineers get the most performance from hardware and find important bottlenecks in software. The Raspberry Pi 3 is one of the easiest systems for learning Streamline, and a quad-core Cortex-A53 also makes it a good target for learning Linux development. Many o... » read more

Tech Talk: DO-254


Aldec's Louie De Luna explains the safety critical standard for the aerospace industry and how that parallels what's happening in automotive electronics. https://youtu.be/qa1g1NNVj60 » read more

Frontloading CFD-Required Technologies


Today, manufacturing product design cycles need to get shorter and shorter as either new or increased numbers of products get to the market faster. In the automotive industry for example, with either facelifts to existing car models, or the next generation of the model appearing almost every 3-4 years, and an increasing number of new models appearing on the market, the demand on engineering des... » read more

Fuzz Testing Maturity Model


Fuzz testing is a highly effective technique for locating vulnerabilities in software. Malformed and unexpected inputs are delivered to the target software, and when failures occur, vulnerabilities have been located. Fuzzing is a widely recognized technique for improving the security, robustness, and safety of software. However, fuzzing is an open-ended pursuit—an infinite space problem. So, ... » read more

Four Foundries Back MRAM


Four major foundries plan to offer MRAM as an embedded memory solution by this year or next, setting the stage for what finally could prove to be a game-changer for this next-generation memory technology. GlobalFoundries, Samsung, TSMC and UMC plan to start offering spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive RAM (ST-MRAM or STT-MRAM) as an alternative or a replacement to NOR flash, possibly start... » read more

The 200mm Equipment Scramble


An explosion in 200mm demand has set off a frenzied search for used semiconductor manufacturing equipment that can be used at older process nodes. The problem is there is not enough used equipment available, and not all of the new or expanding 200mm fabs can afford to pay the premium for refurbished or new equipment. This may sound like a straightforward supply and demand issue, but behind t... » read more

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