October 2017 - Page 2 of 12 - Semiconductor Engineering

Are You Virtually Fast Enough?

By Malte Doerper - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

During high school my class was divided into two camps: Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher fans. Regardless of either camp, the real heated question was whether the driver or the race car is more important. Over the years I lost track and I don’t remember if any of those discussions ever concluded. So now, 25 years later, let me try to engage in a slightly similar but hopefully more balanced... » read more

Inside UVM

By Vatsal Choksi - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

We have all been witnesses to the rapid improvements of the iPhone processor chip every year. With the iPhone 8 featuring the newest A11 Bionic at 10 nm FinFET with 4.3 billion transistors, I can’t personally fathom the amount of the verification effort needed for this type of SoC - the required manpower and time to get the job done is absolutely mind-boggling. Thankfully, we have several pre... » read more

Look Ma, No Hands! Functional Safety From The Driver’s Seat

By McKenzie Ross - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Every so often, I undertake a project that reminds me why I love working in semiconductor marketing. Back in August, I hopped behind the wheel of a Tesla Model X to film a video for OneSpin about how formal verification can help designers to satisfy the ISO 26262 automotive safety standard. If you haven't yet seen the video, you can watch it here: http://bit.ly/2ycK5Yp The Model X itself was... » read more

Four Steps To Verifying An SSD Controller With Emulation

By Ben Whitehead - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

By Ben Whitehead and Paul Morrison Datacenters, cloud computing, the IoT, and all things electronic demand that huge amounts of data and information are stored securely and accessible anywhere at any time. This requirement is driving the adoption of new storage technologies. The capacity, size and performance of solid state drives (SSDs) make it a very interesting technology. It offers h... » read more

Evolution Of The MCU

By Ed Sperling - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Microcontrollers are taking on a variety of new and much more complex computing tasks, evolving from standalone chips to more highly integrated devices that can rival complex microprocessors. Microcontroller units (MCUs) are being designed into everything from assisted and autonomous driving to smart cards. They often are the central processing elements for a slew of connected devices that i... » read more

Shhhhh… Deadlocks Anonymous In Session

By Rajesh Ramanujam - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

I am sure there is an anonymous group – like Alcoholics Anonymous – headquartered in Silicon Valley, meeting every quarter to discuss the deadlocks that have paralyzed their products, roadmap and deployments. In discreet venues in every town, small groups of engineers huddle together to share war stories about the disgruntled customers whose trust was lost because of a deadlock discovered o... » read more

Continuous Integration

By Zach Lasiuk - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

In this article, I tackle the classic question engineers developing software for custom integrated circuits (ICs) grapple with constantly: How do I test my software before the hardware team gets me a working silicon chip? No ‘one size fits all’ solution is provided here (look for that alongside my pet unicorn); instead I detail an easy-to-use yet powerful approach to solve this proble... » read more

Move Data Or Process In Place?

By Brian Bailey - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Should data move to available processors or should processors be placed close to memory? That is a question the academic community has been looking at for decades. Moving data is one of the most expensive and power-consuming tasks, and is often the limiter to system performance. Within a chip, Moore's Law has enabled designers to physically move memory closer to processing, and that has rema... » read more

Dealing With Deadlocks

By Ann Mutschler - 26 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 1

Deadlocks are becoming increasingly problematic as designs becoming more complex and heterogeneous. Rather than just integrating IP, the challenge is understanding all of the possible interactions and dependencies. That affects the choice of IP, how it is implemented in a design, and how it is verified. And it adds a whole bunch of unknowns into an already complex formula for return on inves... » read more