June 2018 - Semiconductor Engineering

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test
By Mark LaPedus - 29 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers and OEMs Fujitsu Semiconductor and United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) announced that UMC will acquire all of the shares of Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited (MIFS), a 300mm wafer foundry joint venture between both companies. In addition to the 15.9% of MIFS shares currently owned by UMC, Fujitsu Semiconductor will transfer the remaining 84.1% of its shares in MIFS to UMC, making MI... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Auto, Security
By Jeff Dorsch - 29 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

Executive Changes Rambus' board of directors named Luc Seraphin, senior vice president and general manager of the company's Memory and Interfaces Division, as interim CEO while it searches for a replacement for Ron Black. The board terminated Black this week, saying the reason for termination did not involve Rambus' financial and business performance. The company also named Mike Noonen as se... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power
By Jesse Allen - 29 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

M&A Siemens acquired Austemper Design Systems, which provides tools for functional safety and safety-critical designs. Founded in 2015, Texas-based Austemper adds state-of-the-art safety analysis, auto-correction and fault simulation technology to address random hardware faults, as well as correct and harden vulnerable areas, subsequently performing fault simulation to ensure the design is... » read more

Toward Cross-Layer Resilience
By Ed Sperling - 28 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

Connected devices are everywhere, and the numbers are growing by orders of magnitude. There are 7 billion people on the planet, but there are expected to be many more billions of connected devices. Each person may have dozens of devices with multiple chips, and those will be connected through infrastructures filled with thousands of additional chips. The problem is that as everything gets c... » read more

Abstraction Aging
By Brian Bailey - 28 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 1

During the course of doing interviews for my article on system simulation and abstraction, I spoke to several people who, just like myself, had started their career pushing abstraction. At the time, we were all frustrated that the industry didn't move fast enough. The advantages of abstraction appeared to be so clear. Everyone developed slides showing that the cost to fix bugs increased the fur... » read more

Wednesday At DAC 2018
By Brian Bailey - 28 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

Wednesday starts with a visionary talk followed by a keynote. The Visionary talk was given by Chidi Chidambaram, VP of engineering for Qualcomm, and looked at 'Challenges to Enable 5G System Scaling.' "We have to start taking a system view rather than just following technology and at the same time we have to get concerned about durability," he said. "Mobile will continue to be the leader becaus... » read more

Adding NoCs To FPGA SoCs
By Ann Mutschler - 28 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

FPGA SoCs straddle the line between flexibility and performance by combining elements of both FPGAs and ASICs. But as they find a home in more safety- and mission-critical markets, they also are facing some of the same issues as standard SoCs, including the ability to move larger and larger amounts of data quickly throughout an increasingly complex device, and the difficulty in verifying and de... » read more

Raising The Bar On Flat CDC Verification With Hierarchical Data Models
By Ashish Hari - 28 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

By Ashish Hari, Aditya Vij, and Ping Yeung Traditionally, clock domain crossing (CDC) verification at the SoC level has relied on flat simulation runs. But flat CDC verification has run out of gas. Largely because of the increase in the number of asynchronous clocks in larger, faster, more complex designs. Flat CDC runs are too performance intensive, time-consuming, and result in high noise.... » read more

The Skies Over EDA Are Finally Cloudy
By Tom Anderson - 28 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 0

EDA companies have been talking for years about providing access to their tools in the cloud, including more articles than I can count with titles about the EDA forecast being cloudy, clouds on the horizon, and so forth. The title of this post continues the dubious tradition of cloud-based puns, but there’s no future tense involved. Recent announcements from several EDA companies make it appe... » read more

Searching For A System Abstraction
By Brian Bailey - 28 Jun, 2018 - Comments: 3

Without abstraction, advances in semiconductor design would have stalled decades ago and circuits would remain about the same size as analog blocks. No new abstractions have emerged since the 1990s that have found widespread adoption. The slack was taken up by IP and reuse, but IP blocks are becoming larger and more complex. Verification by isolation is no longer a viable strategy at the system... » read more

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