July 2018 - Page 2 of 12 - Semiconductor Engineering


Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Automotive Tech Marvell Technology Group opened its automotive electromagnetic compatibility lab in North America. The facility is CISPR 25-qualified and gives the chip company the capability to conduct in-house electrostatic discharge, emission, and immunity testing. Marvell also reported that its 88Q2112 offering received a mark of 100% in conformance testing outlined by the Japan Automotive... » read more

Solving Systemic Complexity


EDA and IP companies have begun branching out in entirely new directions over the past 12 to 18 months, pouring resources into entirely different problems than electrostatic issues and routing complexity. While they're still focused on solving complexity at 10/7/5nm, they also recognize that enabling Moore's Law isn't the only opportunity. For an increasing number of new and established chip... » read more

A New Era For EDA


For almost the entirety of my time in EDA, which is approaching 40 years, the total number of design starts has been declining. A lot of this is to be expected. Semiconductors was the new and exciting world where startups popped up hoping to make it big in Silicon Valley, or indeed to become the next Silicon Valley, Forest, Swamp or Desert. Many of them didn't manage to get beyond a neat concep... » read more

Functional Safety: Art Or Science?


Nowadays, most hardware development projects deploy functional verification flows that include UVM-based constrained-random testbenches and formal verification. High design complexity, tough budget constraints, and short time to market are the norm, not the exception. Advanced verification is a necessity for many engineering teams. In our increasingly connected world, where billions of IoT devi... » read more

The Future Is Bright: DARPA Is Driving Electronic Resurgence


This week, DARPA ran the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) Summit in San Francisco, and while we are certainly staring at some daunting challenges to continue the fast-paced development in electronics, it looks like the future actually looks quite bright. I found myself whistling, “How lucky we are to be alive right now” from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton when leaving the stunning P... » read more

Debug Issues Grow At New Nodes


Debugging and testing chips is becoming more time-consuming, more complicated, and significantly more difficult at advanced nodes as well as in advanced packages. The main problem is that there are so many puzzle pieces, and so many different use cases and demands on those pieces, that it's difficult to keep track of all the changes and potential interactions. Some blocks are "on" sometimes,... » read more

Technical Conferences: The Insurmountable Opportunity


As a technology marketeer, I’m always looking for high-leverage events to promote our brand and gain visibility for new products and services. Let’s face it, this is the main benefit for attending a technical conference or a trade show. While the dream might be 40+ leads that are well-qualified and closable in the quarter, the reality is more of a long-game kind of strategy. For years, t... » read more

When Bugs Escape


Bugs are a fact of life, and they always have been. But verification methodologies may not have evolved fast enough to keep up with the growing size and complexity of systems. The types of bugs are changing, too. Some people call these corner cases. Others call them outliers. Still another group refers to them as simulation-resistance superbugs. In markets such as automotive, the notion o... » read more

“Good Enough For Government Work?” Not Anymore.


When I was an engineer fresh out of college, I worked for a large defense contractor in southern California. The workplace was filled with employees that worked their whole life with the company; some of them for as many as 40 years. To get an idea of how many people I’m talking about, there was a retirement party for at least 3 or 4 people every week just in our division. You can imagine tha... » read more

Where ML Works Best


Anirudh Devgan, president of Cadence, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss machine learning inside and outside of EDA tools and how that will affect the future of chip and system design. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: How do you see the market and use of machine learning shaping up? Devgan: There are three main areas—machine learning inside, machine lear... » read more

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